Re: Should distros take steps to reduce russian access to Free Software?

From: Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>
To: Erica Frank <e.lynn.frank@gmail.com>
Cc: LibrePlanet-discuss <libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org>
Subject: Re: Should distros take steps to reduce russian access to Free Software?
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2022 20:57:09 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <Yi4wddCws/Y4vYf4@protected.localdomain> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CABV+ff8xKwmPO324LL=B_+W4xs-zG78CvDPynUO6aHrJeszcmQ@mail.gmail.com>

* Erica Frank <e.lynn.frank@gmail.com> [2022-03-10 18:33]:
> This makes no sense.
> "Free software" does not mean "until you use it for immoral or illegal
> purposes."

Thanks for your opinion. Yes.

Regarding "immoral":

Please note that what is immoral is hard to define; it is vague and
thus becomes unjust. For an average Muslim it could be immoral to use
GIMP to draw a picture of Muhamed the prophet. Thus we get conflicts. 

Free software is not related to morality beyond the aspect of
computing.

What is "illegal" vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Free
software is global and not jurisdiction specific. We do not want to
"lock" free software into US jurisdiction only or any other, but that
it remains global and compatible with all jurisdictions.

What is "illegal" in one country may be legal in other. People can use
free software to do illegal things. Law and order is handling such
cases. You cannot possibly handle that by using any license.

Here is example of non-free proprietary software that falsely claimes
to be free: https://github.com/WWBN/AVideo

,----
| This Software must be used for Good, never Evil. It is expressly
| forbidden to use AVideo Platform Open-Source to build porn sites,
| violence, racism, terrorism, or anything else that affects human
| integrity or denigrates the image of anyone.
`----

Thus the software is "open source" but it is not free software. 

For many people on this world porn is both moral and legal. For some
others it is not. However, author keeps in chains users of this
software as author is dictating what is moral. Thus it becomes unjust. 

Even for people who do not like porn, there are many movie scenes that
could be construed as porn. It is vague and thus brings
uncertainties. Does author mean soft porn? Or porn only?  The
definition of porn includes written text as well, does author forbid
that too?! It is vague and unjust.

"Violence" is another issue. Is it illegal to report violence on
video? There are many legitimate uses of reporting violence, including
such with educational purposes. It is however author's wish to keep
software user in chains as author solely dictates what type of
violence is "good" and what is "not good".

"Racism" is another issue and it could be biased. Same with
terrorism. And same with "anything that affects human integrity or
denigrates the image of anyone".

All those statements written by naive person lacking legal knowledge
are subject to interpretations, thus vague, and render the software
NOT TO BE free software. It is not. It is proprietary.

Copyrights are only about copyrights, not other rights. What is
illegal or imoral is quite different issue and is subject of those
other rights, not copyrights.

Jean

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https://www.fsf.org/campaigns

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https://stallmansupport.org/

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