… or “How to make your software unusable with questionable legalese”.
Not a lawyer, but I can easily imagine how “An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and does not exploit the labor of non-members” could be interpreted in dozens of different ways, making the use of any such licensed software a very dicey proposition.
> For a "real", pro-freedom AND anti-capitalist software license, please consider GPL 3.
I wouldn't say that GPL3 is "anti-capitalist". Rather, it's extremely pro-freedom and forces certain behavior on part of the capitalists that they aren't inclined to partake in on their own volition.
The intention behind it might be, that doesn't mean that capitalists can't use it as a tool. There's a whole business model in GPLing software and then selling proprietary add-ons (which non-copyright holders can't compete with as they have to offer source) or exceptions to it.
Maybe GPL started as an anti-capitalist license, but in practice it became very much pro-capitalist. It got to the point that GPLv3 and AGPLv3 were split into two licenses to satisfy capitalists.
Among various properly written and practical open source licenses Parity license is probably the most anti-capitalist one.
One problem with GPL2 and GPL3 from an anti-capitalist perspective is that there are lots of ways for capitalists to satisfy the requirements of the license and still make a big pile of money off of it, with the owners of the company pocketing most of the returns. Worse still, the original authors aren't being compensated.
GPL mostly helps with freedoms for the users, which is still very useful.
> An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and does not exploit the labor of non-members
Sounds basically impossible to me. How do you ensure that you don’t exploit the labor of non-members? If you buy as much as even an office chair, or a pencil sharpener, or a carpet, or whatever, there were probably very many people involved and some of them were being exploited in that they were paid a very low amount for their work.
The language intends to describe a co-op, I think. The intent would not be to restrict the license only to organizations which meet the impossible bar of ethical consumption under capitalism, but rather to those in which everyone who contributes to production has a meaningful voice in what is produced and how - or, again, a co-op.
I feel like it would be more useful to describe the types of organizations to which the license refers in terms that might be more clear to people not already familiar. Perhaps I'll email them, or something - shame I can't open a PR.
> the impossible bar of ethical consumption under capitalism
Under non-capitalism ethical consumption would also be rare, as it would be common for money paid by a consumer to be stolen from another, since all labour is rewarded equally without regard to effort or ingenuity.
Various forms of mutualism [1], libertarian socialism [2], market socialism [3] and democratic state socialism [4] are all non-capitalisms. The only "communism" you are familiar with from history is Marxism-Lenninism and Moaism (a variation of the former.) Both of them are authoritarian state socialisms, although I'd argue that their historical incarnations weren't even that since there really was no social ownership, it was just capitalism with a single monopoly and black markets.
This is a weak argument. You're responding with a demand for historical examples of alternatives to an argument, not that history provides examples of all alternatives, but that history provides poor examples of how some alternatives can be implemented.
As presented, your argument reduces to the claim that nothing which has not already been done can ever be done, which is so transparently absurd that I can't imagine it's what you actually intend to say.
> As mentioned in the comment you're replying to, the countries described as social democracies (typically Nordic) are also capitalist.
I'm aware, being that I live in one, which is why I didn't mention social democracy. Democratic socialism is not social democracy which my reference explains.
> What countries have mutualist economies?
The question betrays a misunderstanding of what mutualism is.
If only a country can have an economy, this would exclude global and local economies of the current system from the discussion of economic models. Check your assumptions. They are wrong.
Until the mid-18th century, there were no "working examples" of laissez-faire capitalism, which has since become the dominant global model. Economic circumstances change; in its fairly short history, many examples have shown that laissez-faire capitalism is vulnerable to collapse during periods of economic instability (fascism, authoritarian communism). Don't be so confident that new systems aren't possible when one of the defining traits of laissez-faire capitalism is a tendency to become unstable, fall apart, and be replaced with new systems.
Incidentally, if you'd read the link which the other poster provided on market socialism, you'd have noticed that it scales in exactly the same way that laissez-faire capitalism scales, making your critique unfounded.
I gave you Chiapas elsewhere in the thread as well as a long list [1]. There's also Rojava. But you don't even need to go that far, every worker-owned cooperative, credit union and mutual insurance is mutualist.
Many further examples in history tend to be wiped out by those already in power. Furthermore, there were also no examples of capitalism before capitalism either, so it's not surprising.
> Sounds basically impossible to me. How do you ensure that you don’t exploit the labor of non-members?
If I'm not mistaken, it's suggesting that you can only buy from other worker-owned cooperatives.
> If you buy as much as even an office chair, or a pencil sharpener, or a carpet, or whatever, there were probably very many people involved and some of them were being exploited in that they were paid a very low amount for their work.
If you're not buying from another worker-owned cooperative you could buy it second-hand, which isn't ordering any new labor to be done.
If this is what they intended and if this wasn't clear to you then I think that's a problem for the license because there's really no room for such ambiguity and interpretation. It's going to have to be a lot more explicit than it is for it to be useful.
The licence prohibits Law Enforcement use. What does that have to do with Capitalism? I'm fairly sure every socialist/communist/facist country has some form of law enforcement.
Ah yes, countries like Somalia do so well without a system of functioning government and laws. With the added benefit of no taxes! But you might have to pay protection money to your local warlord so YMMV.
CHAZ/CHOP is a horrible example since most of the discourse about it is based on falsehoods and exaggerations, and it existed in a state of constant conflict with local law enforcement. There were certainly many good things about it, but I'm not sure you can learn much from it in the grand scope of things other than "it won't work out well, because most forces don't want it to exist".
There are definitely examples out there of more successful self-governance, though.
When the community elects to police itself, if someone volunteers to watch a neighbourhood for a night are they considered law enforcement? If not, why? I recognize there's a difference but this license makes no effort to distinguish between those two things.
And if your starting point for why a term of a license is "we don't need laws", what exactly is the point of having a license anyway?
Sure, that's fine - my point is that a blanket "you can't be law enforcement" doesn't make this distinction. If you want to include something like that in your license, you need to be a lot more clear about what "law enforcement" entails. Right now it makes no mention of whether it's speaking about professional law enforcement, state-operated law enforcement, or anything like that.
> When the community elects to police itself, if someone volunteers to watch a neighbourhood for a night are they considered law enforcement? If not, why?
The difference would be that they would be chosen from the community by the community, not external to it and chosen by external actors.
> "we don't need laws"
This confounds laws with law enforcement. The concepts you're missing are consent and cooperation.
> I'm not the one making the claim that laws are a social construct
Now you're confounding two further ideas. Laws are obviously a social construct, nobody serious is going to disagree with that. We create them, unlike the laws of nature.
As I understand it, the difference is that law enforcement exists to maintain a state's authority and control of its monopoly on violence, whereas community policing claims no such authority or interest.
There's nothing inherent to the words "law enforcement" that necessitates that they are state run or makes any claim about the state's position on violence. I get that's what the authors are getting at, but it's not clear.
Yes it did, CHAZ/CHOP was the stepping stone for a zone controlled by the people, until the totalitarian police got involved that it was unfortunately destroyed.
Is the GPL not just as teenager-like with its radical openness? Wanting to maintain your values through a software license feels passive and sneaky and awkward, but that's how we do it. And if you value your labor and the labor of others, in a way the GPL does not, why not write that into the license?
Harsh, I agree. But deserved? "Modern art" (in the vernacular sense, rather than the art-history one) seems to me a 'thought-terminating cliché', an excuse to disdain an entire and rather broad field of endeavor without first taking the trouble to engage at all with it.
At least that's how I find I most often see it used. Perhaps that's not what is actually happening here, but nothing I've seen so far distinguishes this example from any other of the type. Nor do I see any reason why this example deserves any more favorable consideration than any other.
How common is this in worker co-operatives? My guess is "doesn't exist anywhere" -- I'm guessing there's always some correlation between seniority and ownership share, even if it's just "you have to pass a short probationary period before you're an owner".
It sounds like they haven't really thought this through. Besides seniority -- does someone who's worked there for twenty years really deserve the same share of ownership that someone who started last week does? -- there's also hours to consider: does someone who works ten or twenty hours a week deserve the same share as someone who works forty hours a week? I think most would agree that doesn't really make sense, but the current wording of the license mandates it.
Hours are also not necessarily a good measure of contribution. A good developer can put in 1 hour of work and produce more value than a bad developer in 2, 5, or even 10 hours.
> the camp that believes pay should be proportional to the value produced
The problem is that no one knows, how to evaluate this proportion. Assuming LTV makes sense, how to evaluate who contributes more: a designer or a programmer.
Don't guess if you don't know anything about any real life co-ops. Not trying to be mean, but co-ops with equal share ownership do exists - so your post is close to make believe.
I've seen comments to the effect that making the license impractical (and non-lawyer-approved) was intended as a way to ensure big companies like Google won't touch it. Not sure how I feel about that as a strategy, but there's a certain logic to it, similar to Crockford's "do no evil" license.
The GPL is not anti-capitalist but it will in some ways stop businesses profiting of your work withing giving back.
I believe all software should be either some variant of the GPL or GPL/Commercial dual. The latter is so a company can choose not to comply with the GPL but still give back to the project (financially).
Anti-capitalism is a strange ideology given recent history. Most flaws pointed at capitalism today actually stem from problems that most capitalists would take issue with (corruption, overregulation, underregulation etc.). The people who built the Soviet Union and other socialist countries weren't stupid, the task is just impossible.
The SaaS paradigm trivially defeats the intent of the GPL, doesn't it?
The problem people have with capitalism isn't that it has failure modes; every economic ideology has those. The problem people have with capitalism is that, in a capitalist society, the failure modes of capitalism are the ones that are the problem, and it's very hard to see how the status quo could be repaired without having to be replaced.
(Which I think is fair. Look at what it took to fix it last time, and how long that hasn't lasted...)
Anti-capitalists would argue that those problems (corporatism, money-in-politics, wealth inequality) are inevitable products of capitalism.
Obviously the Soviet model was a failure, but I think it's a bit silly to use the failure of one competing model as an argument that no other model could ever succeed.
The Soviet model is not proof that no other model could ever succeed.
However it (and other failed communisms) are proof of particular failure modes. Given that these are the outcomes we know about, they are a reasonable null hypothesis.
Amongst modern proponents of socialism I have not so far seen anyone actually say how those failure modes would be avoided.
The failure mode of authoritarian communist regimes was simple. They failed in the same way that authoritarian capitalist regimes like the Pinochet's Chilean government did: the people in power didn't care about the well-being of the general public, and so the economy ultimately collapsed because the needs of the public weren't being met. This is a problem solved by democracy.
Now, if you want to argue that there are problems with economic planning, I'm right there with you. I think that market incentives have historically been a more reliable way of running an economy, and that market socialism [1] is a much more viable alternative than a state-planned economy. But it's worth noting that it's hard to make strong claims about the consequences of economic planning when it's never been implemented in a democratic society.
Regardless, concerns about the failure modes of authoritarian communist states don't really make sense in the context of market socialism, since it involves neither authoritarianism nor economic planning.
How would this be applied in the case where the user was a wholly-or-partially state-funded organization (that was neither military nor law enforcement)?
[clearly hasn't been lawyer-vetted, but any wild guesses?]
At a guess, State or NIAID or NCBI would be permitted to use software with this license - the distinction appears to be that civil government or NGO is allowed, while military or LE is not.
Not, I agree, that this would likely prove enforceable as written, but I think that's what they're going for. And maybe they're trying to elicit a test case? That makes more sense than some of the speculation at hand, I think.
Part of the genius of the work of RMS- his behavioral issues aside- is the creation out of whole cloth of a legal protocol that is sufficiently precisely defined, sufficiently operationalizable, and sufficiently defensible as to...actually work, to have behavioral impacts in the real world. It is hard to appreciate how incredible an achievement that is.
This license is not that, for all sorts of obvious reasons, which is a shame. Articulating a set of use principles in the extremely broad area the authors have an interest in is not impossible. Not only not impossible, but desirable. Software is leverage, and working to ensure leverage can only be used by the weaker party in any specific context is part of an equity protocol. If such a thing is going to exist, someone has to do the work to define it. One hopes they take a step back and give it another go.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadNot a lawyer, but I can easily imagine how “An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and does not exploit the labor of non-members” could be interpreted in dozens of different ways, making the use of any such licensed software a very dicey proposition.
For a "real", pro-freedom AND anti-capitalist software license, please consider GPL 3.
And for a "real", pro-freedom AND capitalism-agnostic software license, consider MIT.
I wouldn't say that GPL3 is "anti-capitalist". Rather, it's extremely pro-freedom and forces certain behavior on part of the capitalists that they aren't inclined to partake in on their own volition.
IMHO among the various OS licenses, GPL it's the more inclined toward anti-capitalism. But that's a personal reading.
Among various properly written and practical open source licenses Parity license is probably the most anti-capitalist one.
GPL mostly helps with freedoms for the users, which is still very useful.
Sounds basically impossible to me. How do you ensure that you don’t exploit the labor of non-members? If you buy as much as even an office chair, or a pencil sharpener, or a carpet, or whatever, there were probably very many people involved and some of them were being exploited in that they were paid a very low amount for their work.
I feel like it would be more useful to describe the types of organizations to which the license refers in terms that might be more clear to people not already familiar. Perhaps I'll email them, or something - shame I can't open a PR.
Under non-capitalism ethical consumption would also be rare, as it would be common for money paid by a consumer to be stolen from another, since all labour is rewarded equally without regard to effort or ingenuity.
What other non-capitalist modes of economy exist? Agrarian society isn't too common, social democracy is a form of capitalism.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(economic_theory)
[2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
[3]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
[4]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism
That is the only communism that has ever existed at scale. Please stop trying to equate documented world history with personal subjective viewpoints.
> Various forms of mutualism [1], libertarian socialism [2], market socialism [3] and democratic state socialism [4] are all non-capitalisms.
As mentioned in the comment you're replying to, the countries described as social democracies (typically Nordic) are also capitalist.
What countries have mutualist economies?
As presented, your argument reduces to the claim that nothing which has not already been done can ever be done, which is so transparently absurd that I can't imagine it's what you actually intend to say.
You find that weak? OK.
I'm aware, being that I live in one, which is why I didn't mention social democracy. Democratic socialism is not social democracy which my reference explains.
> What countries have mutualist economies?
The question betrays a misunderstanding of what mutualism is.
That's not what I wrote. I asked for a model that scales. Generally economic systems are implemented nationally.
> Check your assumptions. They are wrong.
No. You don't have a working example of the system you are citing as a possible alternative. We're both aware of this.
Incidentally, if you'd read the link which the other poster provided on market socialism, you'd have noticed that it scales in exactly the same way that laissez-faire capitalism scales, making your critique unfounded.
Many further examples in history tend to be wiped out by those already in power. Furthermore, there were also no examples of capitalism before capitalism either, so it's not surprising.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities
Rare, but not outright impossible.
If I'm not mistaken, it's suggesting that you can only buy from other worker-owned cooperatives.
> If you buy as much as even an office chair, or a pencil sharpener, or a carpet, or whatever, there were probably very many people involved and some of them were being exploited in that they were paid a very low amount for their work.
If you're not buying from another worker-owned cooperative you could buy it second-hand, which isn't ordering any new labor to be done.
If this is what they intended and if this wasn't clear to you then I think that's a problem for the license because there's really no room for such ambiguity and interpretation. It's going to have to be a lot more explicit than it is for it to be useful.
Even if we do, the community can govern themselves.
It would have been entirely different had they not got involved.
There are definitely examples out there of more successful self-governance, though.
And if your starting point for why a term of a license is "we don't need laws", what exactly is the point of having a license anyway?
It is 'community enforcement', they volunteered didn't they, it's not by force, by state, or are being paid to do it.
The difference would be that they would be chosen from the community by the community, not external to it and chosen by external actors.
> "we don't need laws"
This confounds laws with law enforcement. The concepts you're missing are consent and cooperation.
I'm not the one making the claim that laws are a social construct and we don't need them.
Now you're confounding two further ideas. Laws are obviously a social construct, nobody serious is going to disagree with that. We create them, unlike the laws of nature.
Laws are a social construct. We do need them. Civilization has proven this time and again over thousands of years.
So law enforcement chosen by the community is not law enforcement?
The authors probably thought the meaning would be obvious to everyone because it was obvious to them, but that's not how binding legal contracts work.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities
I'd guess that this license is towards utopian ideals than actual reality.
At least that's how I find I most often see it used. Perhaps that's not what is actually happening here, but nothing I've seen so far distinguishes this example from any other of the type. Nor do I see any reason why this example deserves any more favorable consideration than any other.
How common is this in worker co-operatives? My guess is "doesn't exist anywhere" -- I'm guessing there's always some correlation between seniority and ownership share, even if it's just "you have to pass a short probationary period before you're an owner".
It sounds like they haven't really thought this through. Besides seniority -- does someone who's worked there for twenty years really deserve the same share of ownership that someone who started last week does? -- there's also hours to consider: does someone who works ten or twenty hours a week deserve the same share as someone who works forty hours a week? I think most would agree that doesn't really make sense, but the current wording of the license mandates it.
- the camp that believes pay should be proportional to the value produced;
or
- the camp that believes pay should be proportional to the effort put in.
The problem is that no one knows, how to evaluate this proportion. Assuming LTV makes sense, how to evaluate who contributes more: a designer or a programmer.
The Three Rivers Co-op (a consumer co-op) publishes their bylaws and explains how it works. Worker co-ops are similarly verbose on this as well. https://www.threeriversmarket.coop/co-op-membership/
If not then you could trivially fleece them by joining then immediately leaving with your share.
I severely doubt the practically and usability of this.
I would be interested to see an expert lawyers take on how to write this license, so that it could actually work and hold up in court.
The GPL is a work of genius in part because it encourages use and propagation.
Creating a stupid license blocks even legitimate users, which prevents the social program from progressing.
I believe all software should be either some variant of the GPL or GPL/Commercial dual. The latter is so a company can choose not to comply with the GPL but still give back to the project (financially).
Anti-capitalism is a strange ideology given recent history. Most flaws pointed at capitalism today actually stem from problems that most capitalists would take issue with (corruption, overregulation, underregulation etc.). The people who built the Soviet Union and other socialist countries weren't stupid, the task is just impossible.
The problem people have with capitalism isn't that it has failure modes; every economic ideology has those. The problem people have with capitalism is that, in a capitalist society, the failure modes of capitalism are the ones that are the problem, and it's very hard to see how the status quo could be repaired without having to be replaced.
(Which I think is fair. Look at what it took to fix it last time, and how long that hasn't lasted...)
Obviously the Soviet model was a failure, but I think it's a bit silly to use the failure of one competing model as an argument that no other model could ever succeed.
However it (and other failed communisms) are proof of particular failure modes. Given that these are the outcomes we know about, they are a reasonable null hypothesis.
Amongst modern proponents of socialism I have not so far seen anyone actually say how those failure modes would be avoided.
Now, if you want to argue that there are problems with economic planning, I'm right there with you. I think that market incentives have historically been a more reliable way of running an economy, and that market socialism [1] is a much more viable alternative than a state-planned economy. But it's worth noting that it's hard to make strong claims about the consequences of economic planning when it's never been implemented in a democratic society.
Regardless, concerns about the failure modes of authoritarian communist states don't really make sense in the context of market socialism, since it involves neither authoritarianism nor economic planning.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
IANAL but I'm just guessing no court would take this seriously.
[clearly hasn't been lawyer-vetted, but any wild guesses?]
Not, I agree, that this would likely prove enforceable as written, but I think that's what they're going for. And maybe they're trying to elicit a test case? That makes more sense than some of the speculation at hand, I think.
https://coss.media/advent-of-ethos-licensing/
The most famous is the JSON Good-Not-Evil one.
I particularly like the term 'crayon license' for licenses drawn up by people without experience in writing licenses.
This license is not that, for all sorts of obvious reasons, which is a shame. Articulating a set of use principles in the extremely broad area the authors have an interest in is not impossible. Not only not impossible, but desirable. Software is leverage, and working to ensure leverage can only be used by the weaker party in any specific context is part of an equity protocol. If such a thing is going to exist, someone has to do the work to define it. One hopes they take a step back and give it another go.
Also: would this then include Amazon pre-2001?