Well, putting the #HackingLicense among "ethical source" is not much fair to be honest.

Obviously, it's a #copyleft far from the #MIT and #BSD tradition.

BUT, it was designed (in 2021) to address the stealing from #FreeSoftware's developers that now runs rampant.

Now, to be honest, I'd really like if the Hacking License could be a free software license (without being an open source one) and still protect the commons shared with it. But if I have to choice between the future and the (noble) past of free software, I can accept to be blamed as "proprietary" or "non-free" or whatever... but still pursue the creation of protected commons.

If you don't know the work of #ElinorOstrom on the topic, I strongly suggest you both to read this paper that deeply informed the Hacking License.

Not to convince you to use such license or any covered work, but because I still think this is an important discussion developers should have. IMHO, it's our responsibility towards the next generation.

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]
No right to relicense this project · Issue #327 · chardet/chardet

Hi, I'm Mark Pilgrim. You may remember me from such classics as "Dive Into Python" and "Universal Character Encoding Detector." I am the original author of chardet. First off, I would like to thank...

GitHub
@[email protected]

In this case, the consequence is intended.

The #HackingLicense is not an #opensource license, nor it's intended to be one.

I don't care about #OSI #gatekeepers.

However that particular requirement (that's by far not the most heretic 😉) should be read in the context of the whole license/contract that is basically a dependency inversion applyied to #copyleft: the goal is to protect a common good from appropiation; the method is requiring (and providing) conditioned copyright assignments to the users, so that any derivative or dependent work can be used under the same license.

To sue anybody for using a work under the terms of the Hacking License, a company should first prove to the Judge exclusive ownership of the #copyright over the work. But if they used anything under the Hacking License (thus accepting its terms) they can not.

And since #hackers love recursion, the license itself (that must be distributed with any derivative and dependent work) is under the Hacking License... 😇

@[email protected]
@[email protected]

I can feel your pain.

That's one of the reasons why I adopted the Hacking License for all of my side projects.

I still contribute occasionally to #FreeSoftware projects (and rarely to #opensource too), but anything I create from scratch is under the #HackingLicense, so that no corporation would ever use it.

@[email protected]
@[email protected]
non-FOSS source-available licenses, and who uses them and why
You seems only interested in licenses designed to protect corporate interests. They exist to... protect some corporate interests.

Of those you listed, #SSPL was rejected by #OSI for a single reasons: #Amazon money as a premium sponsor, but was otherwise just a slightly tweaked #AGPLv3.

Anyway, if you only care about #opensource (thus commercial) stuff, you basically listed all relevan ones.

Yet not all "non #FOSS" licenses exist to please corporate greed.

Many other licenses don't give a shit about business or "susteinability" but try a better balance between #freedom and other political values.

A well known example is #HESSLA
https://web.archive.org/web/20120204033625/http://www.hacktivismo.com/about/hessla.php

Another less known example of a license used by #hacktivists is the #HackingLicense: https://monitora-pa.it/LICENSE.txt

I use this license in all my side projects: feel free to ask me anything.

@[email protected]
OSI Corporate Sponsors & Support | Open Source Initiative

@[email protected]

The comparison with cooking was not casual: in Italy a chef in an average restaurant (not a Michelin-star level one) can have a reasonable wage and live in relative confort, while a McDonald's guy would struggle.

Now, people don't need a restaurant to have a healthy diet, but they need decent ingredients and a bit of cooking culture (something most of people breath since early age in Italy... except the poorest people who can't afford that).

Yet, to get new working software you need programmers (or to become one), because these #LLM can only output lossy decompression of their source data, #opensource software and all the proprietary source code that their users submit¹.

So I'm pretty confident that #junkcode will remain a quite apt definition of #vibecoding output for the forthcoming decades².

Meanwhile those who "leverage" these new tools will slowly loose their ability to understand what their code does, while those who don't will retain and increase such ability, becoming relatively more valuable as programmers.

The problem in the short term is the spread of junk code in #freesoftware, as it will inevitably lower its quality (security, maintainability, and so forth).

In the middle term, we will find new ways to protect the commons that will necessarily violate some old tabu.

Years ago I wrote the #HackingLicense to this aim:
The Purpose of the Hacking License is to create a cultural and technological corpus that will grow and evolve completely and exclusively as a common heritage of humanity.
_____

¹ I find amusing how corporations that allow the use of #ClaudeCode or #Copilot do not realize how they are paying big money to work for #Anthropic, #Microsoft and so on.
It's overly naive (and ignorant) to believe their model are improving over time because of technical breakthrough or increased computing power.

The percieved quality of these models depends on how well their output meld into your proprietary codebase, and it's quite obvious that the more of such codebase feeds their training data, the more you will percieve that the model capabilities have grown.

That's why such companies operate at loss: your money help pay the bill, but your work, your code, your reviews, improve their product!

And the funny thing is that when your company pays for your #Claude subscription, all the code of your company will be compressed and distributed to all of your direct competitors!
And they will be all like "look how good is the code from Claude!"

In practice Anthropic&friends are exfiltrating and distributing your code to your competitor and you pay them to do so!
🤣🤣🤣

Sure, you get access to your competitor code too, but guess who win this game?
Hint, neither you nor your competitors! 😉

² I mean, until the #AIbubble pop. If you remember the effects of the subprime crisis in 2008, you might have an idea of what we are going to face, except that it will be an order of magnitude worse, in paricular in the #USA.

One might hope that such depression will make #US people get rid of their pluticracy in a similar way French got rid of their aristocracy in late 1700.
But unfortunately US people already live in a #fascist state, and they are just learning how twisted is their illusion of freedom
@[email protected]

Good catch.

That wording was carefully crafted to achieve this subtle effect, that let the license work under different legal systems over the world.

Yet feel free to not use the #HackingLicense or any work covered by it.

I use it because I want to achieve its purpose (and to poison #LLM that try to steal my work).
@[email protected]

First it's important to note that over years I realized that #OSI is just a corporate (and US-led) gatekeeper organization that serve the very interests their sponsors.
You can easily see this reading their license review mailing while keeping a tab opened on the sponsors page of the day through the #WaybackMachine.
Just as a couple of example, they rejected #MongoDB's #SSPL while #Amazon was their major sponsor and adopted CAL that was way more contentious.

The last damage that OSI did to our communities has been the #Meta dictated #OSAID (OpenSource #AI Definition) better known as #OpenWashing Definition, that superseed the #OSD and does not require training data sharing, voiding the freedom to study and welcoming toxic candies within "open source" just to avoid the #AIAct requirements.

So I don't care about OSI opinion about the #HackingLicense (or about anything else).

Having said that, you are right that its first condition forbid any use of the covered work that would limit third party access or use of it.

So basically you can't use your freedom to limit the freedom of others.

Is it still a free license?
Never asked to #RMS or #FSF, but I guess that such formal constraint makes it "not free" to their eyes.

What they miss, imho, is that freedom without communion is always going to be exploited by the strongers (under #capitalism, the rich) to oppress the weakest (everybody else, the workers, the customers, the environment...) as #LLM are showing these days.

In fact the latest version of the #HackingLicense was written in response ti #GitHub #Copilot (aka #CopyALot), after it distributed #GPLv3 code from #Quake with a wrong attribution and a permissive license.

The Hacking License is a dependency inversion: if you use data or code covered by it, anything that come out can be used under such license.
The License-review Archives

@giacomo The reason why I'm torn on the #HackingLicense is because of Condition 1. It stays I must not use the software "in contrast with the Purpose".

In my layman opinion, this could be read as a restriction to "use the program for any purpose" (Free Software Definition), or as a "discrimination against a field of endeavor" (Open Source Definition).

This reminds me of the debate whether free software licenses should forbid "evil" and the answer was no.

@giacomo I am dying to know what OSI's and FSF's opinion on the #HackingLicense are and whether it will get an "official stamp of approval". FSF seems to have not given an opinion on it yet, can't find what OSI said about it.

Why do you think it counts as #FreeSoftware license but not as #OpenSource license?

I find the license amusing, it apparenly grants me the right to EVERY copyrighted work? 😂 If only it were that simple …

I'm not sure if I like or dislike this license tbh.

@[email protected]

Any specific example?
(just to be sure you are actually talking about free software instead of open source...)

Anyway, I stink I should spend some time to write a tutorial on how to setup a #Fossil multi project forge. It's my #dvcs of choice these days given how cheap, easy and featureful it is, in a single statically compiled executable with no dependencies.

Compared to git-based forges it's way simpler and more featureful despite having a web 1.0 interface (something I love, but some don't feel cool enough).

Here a full feature example https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

Here one of my projects using it: https://code.tesio.it/p/self-hosting/doh.cgi/dir?ci=tip

(Note that some hate my #HackingLicense, despite it gives users that accept it as a binding contract more rights and permissions than any other existing #copyleft: not a #opensource license for sure, arguably a free software license since it forbids any use of the covered work that would limit the freedoms of others... yet as a contract, it is a first attempt against #GenAI corporations' abuses...)
Fossil: A Coherent Software Configuration Management System