That it be licensed with an open source license, yet folk are acting like they've never heard of security clearances, or that the license will somehow supercede all of our other laws regarding document security.
Then again I wouldn't be surprised if the same voices on hearing freedom of information being proposed to raise similar "but military secrets" objections that were completely divorced from reality.
Probably because the campaign this post links to puts forward a completely un-nuanced argument, and even trivialises or brushes over most of the reasonable criticism you could make about the case it’s putting forward.
I don’t know why so many activists fail to understand this. If you have a cause that you think is important, putting forward a shitty argument for it isn’t going to help in the long run.
It isnt a shitty argument - do you think that a permissive license supersedes security clearances?
I find it powerfully frustrating to see these sort of reactions where people act like the very first thing they can think of that might require nuance is this fatal flaw, or that even a robust critique represents some death blow. Critical feedback improves projects so it is bewildering to me to see people treat it as the last word.
This project isn’t in need of critical feedback. The fatal problems with the proposition they’ve put forward are plainly obvious. They’ve simply chosen to try and ignore them.
I also support making publicly funded code open source. But campaigning for all government licensed code to be made open source by legislation, especially with no indication of what reasonable limits you think that should include, is a fundamentally stupid idea. Microsoft isn’t going to open source windows to retain government licenses, and government orgs aren’t going to stop using windows. This position puts this project in the camp of ideological extremists who are simply disconnected from reality. Including scaremongering about the security of proprietary software is also an incredibly weak and unnecessary inclusion here.
If this campaign were to gain some traction with the public, the only thing it would achieve is attaching supporters of a more reasonable version of this idea, with a stupid and trivially easy to dismiss argument to support it.
The entire video on the front page advocates for public organisations to only use software that is open source.
> Mostly our administrations procure proprietary software, this means a lot of money goes into licenses that last for a limited amount of time, and restrict our rights. We aren’t allow to use our infrastructure in a reasonable way, and because the source code of proprietary software is usually a business secret, finding security holes, or deliberately installed back doors, is extremely difficult and even illegal. But our public administrations can do better, if all publicly financed software were to be free and open source, we could use and share our infrastructure for anything, and for as long as we wanted.
It seems like you missed how stupid this proposal is. Perhaps you simply assumed that it aligned with your own, less stupid, preconceived version of this idea? In which case you should consider that this campaign is clearly targeting people who are unfamiliar with the entire concept of open source software, in order to properly gauge how harmful it could be.
If you’re trying to promote an idea that the public is largely disinterested in, then putting forward a strawman argument for it yourself is only going to empower its detractors.
I'm sure that demise has nothing to do with the change from unions literally fighting armed strike breakers on the streets to unions being heavily regulated bureaucratic entities that are on first name terms with the corporate owners that used to hire the armed strike breakers.
By legalizing narrow avenues for union conduct, we have also heavily disincentivized any behavior outside those avenues. The "fat cat" union reps that live off your dues without contributing anything meaningful to your rights are ultimately an intentional creation of this de-radicalization. Incidentally the Red Scare helped quite a bit by making unions scared of seeming "too leftist" when the existence of unions itself is born out of a leftist understanding of class conflict (not "class" as in how much money you have but "class" as in whether you have to work for a living or people pay you for what you already own).
