Can activity pub change it’s terms to say that all crawlers that use this must be gnu open sources and all information crawled must be open to the public on gnu open sources software (no crawling to a private enterprise)?
My understanding is all the big tech companies are scared of what happened with router software (openwrt) and they don’t want to be forced to let competition be a foss community via gnu licensing.
Isn’t ActivityPub just an application protocol? To my knowledge there’s no ActivityPub inc. licensing the usage of the protocol or anything like that. A web protocol is just a series of guidelines everyone has agreed on following, you can’t attach terms and conditions to it.
Indeed.
Licensing usage of something is antithetical to free software culture anyway.
It would violate the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Zero, that you should never have to accept a licence to use something.
(This is why free software cannot ever have a EULA, for instance)
TIL. Never really cared about the legal aspect of FOSS for anything other than slapping a GPL license next to anything I write but that is an interesting fact.
It’s come up in interesting cases.
I can’t remember which package it was, but there was one package that was distributed under the humourous “Don’t Be Evil License”, where you could “use this software for anything that’s not evil” or something like that.
This technically does not qualify as free software (freedom 0 must allow anyone to use it for evil), so Red Hat (I think it was?) had to get their lawyers to contact the developer and get him to give them an exemption to the licence, just in case one of their users used it for evil.
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Can activity pub change it’s terms to say that all crawlers that use this must be gnu open sources and all information crawled must be open to the public on gnu open sources software (no crawling to a private enterprise)?
My understanding is all the big tech companies are scared of what happened with router software (openwrt) and they don’t want to be forced to let competition be a foss community via gnu licensing.
Isn’t ActivityPub just an application protocol? To my knowledge there’s no ActivityPub inc. licensing the usage of the protocol or anything like that. A web protocol is just a series of guidelines everyone has agreed on following, you can’t attach terms and conditions to it.
The thing they could do is block the servers of Meta or route to tor for anything sent to meta.
Eh, it still wouldn’t be “free software” at that point. “Free” also means freedom to send your data to Meta if you want to.
Indeed. Licensing usage of something is antithetical to free software culture anyway. It would violate the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Zero, that you should never have to accept a licence to use something. (This is why free software cannot ever have a EULA, for instance)
TIL. Never really cared about the legal aspect of FOSS for anything other than slapping a GPL license next to anything I write but that is an interesting fact.
It’s come up in interesting cases. I can’t remember which package it was, but there was one package that was distributed under the humourous “Don’t Be Evil License”, where you could “use this software for anything that’s not evil” or something like that. This technically does not qualify as free software (freedom 0 must allow anyone to use it for evil), so Red Hat (I think it was?) had to get their lawyers to contact the developer and get him to give them an exemption to the licence, just in case one of their users used it for evil.
LMAO that’s hilarious. Love it.
This is a good shout