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


From: Miles Fidelman
Subject: Re: Should distros take steps to reduce russian access to Free Software?
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2022 14:36:30 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0 SeaMonkey/2.53.11

Aaron Wolf wrote:
The recent podcast from Humane Tech folks grapples with the complexities of this issue:

https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/49-the-dark-side-of-decentralization

Now, that does not really relate to powerful government entities like the Russian military, but it does get into questions of danger and risk as people access technology. We can probably all see that if there were some software that would have the effect of a nuclear bomb, making that free software and distributing it to the world would be insane. There are some powers too dangerous to let exist and others too dangerous to allow individuals to operate without a whole system of checks-and-balances.

An awful lot of cyber-attack tools are out there, freely available. Also crypto stuff, like TOR (courtesy of the US Navy, by the way).

This is an interesting debate about software freedom and whether there are places we should consider limiting it.

Of course it's a little hard to do that, except for classified work, done in secure labs, by people who get thrown in Leavenworth if they release their work.  And even then...

Miles Fidelman


Now, I don't agree with the tactic of the new ethical-source-license ideas where all the code is available and they try to use Copyright licenses to enforce ethical use. That can't solve these issues.

But I think there's some challenging legitimate questions here, despite Jacob's views being largely misunderstandings for the current situation.

-Aaron

On 2022-03-11 21:27, Jean Louis wrote:
* Jacob Hrbek <kreyren@rixotstudio.cz> [2022-03-11 21:00]:
"Free software" does not mean "until you use it for immoral or illegal
purposes."

Freedom Software (Free Software) is based on the principles of Four Freedoms
of Franklin D. Roosevelt namely:

1. Freedom of speech
2. Freedom of worship/religion
3. Freedom of want
4. Freedom from fear

Which is basically 1:1 copy of Four Freedoms of Free software with just
changed wording to apply for computer science.

Not that I am aware of it, as I have not read it in Richard Stallman's
Manifesto. Your statements are not related to free software.

Freedom of speech if fundamental to US constitution and US in general,
though religion, "want" and "fear" are not related. How I know about
Dr. Stallman from his writings, religion has nothing to do with free
software.

The GNU Manifesto - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html

Free software is not a perpertrator, it is useful resource for
people. How people use it is freedom zero, users may use it how they
wish.

In every war on every side there are criminals who will use anything
for their evil intentions, maybe software, but maybe other tools, like
ropes, knives, timber, steel, poison, and so on. Please do not blame
manufacturers nor authors of resources to be perpetrators.

Finally free software may be used on both sides by humanitarian
organizations, by hospitals, nurses, doctors, who save lives,
including lives of Ukrainians/Russians as prisoners.

Please don't blame useful resource like software to be the
perpetrator, it is not.

Best is to find other place to promote other political agenda than on
Libreplanet mailing list.

Let us not discriminate on this mailing list against any Russian or
Ukrainian for reasons of their ethnicity, opinion or nationality.

Let us stick to basics of Human Rights and adhere in our good behavior
towards any ethnicity on this mailing list.

Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights | Stand up for human rights | UN Human Rights Office
https://standup4humanrights.org/en/article.html

What we have is free software and that is what brings us together.


Jean

Take action in Free Software Foundation campaigns:
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns

In support of Richard M. Stallman
https://stallmansupport.org/

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In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
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