On Open Source Mythology
There are two points of popular open source mythology this post will share my experience with:
- People won’t use your project if you don’t use an Open Source Initiative-approved license
- People won’t contribute to to your project if you don’t use an Open Source Initiative-approved license
Many people have ideas about how society should be like and what must be done to change institutions and to work for a revolution. But this is not enough. Often these ideas do not conform to reality and if they do conform to reality there is only one way to test them: Try to put them to work and see if they succeed. Testing our ideas in concrete work is the only way we will ever know if they are correct.
I maintain a tiling window manager for Windows called komorebi which is made available under the Komorebi License.
The Komorebi License is both an educational source license which ensures the availability of source code to individuals for personal use, modification, learning and reference, and a firewall license which preserves an individual’s freedom to refuse by default (… like a firewall!)
The preservation of an individual’s freedom to refuse by default means that the Komorebi License is not an Open Source Initiative-approved license.
As of the publication of this post, komorebi has 126k downloads and 10.6k stargazers on GitHub, and while I am still by far the most active and primary contributor to the project, there is a healthy stream of users who like to contribute patches for things they have a personal interest in improving.
It often happens, however, that thinking lags behind reality; this is because man’s cognition is limited by numerous social conditions. We are opposed to die-hards in the revolutionary ranks whose thinking fails to advance with changing objective circumstances and has manifested itself historically as Right opportunism. These people fail to see that the struggle of opposites has already pushed the objective process forward while their knowledge has stopped at the old stage. This is characteristic of the thinking of all die-hards. Their thinking is divorced from social practice, and they cannot march ahead to guide the chariot of society; they simply trail behind, grumbling that it goes too fast and trying to drag it back or turn it in the opposite direction.
I do not believe I am alone in having the desire to share what I have learned so that other people might learn from it, while not buying into the idea that in order to do that effectively, I also have to use a software license which requires me to forfeit my freedom to refuse.
I do not believe that there needs to be a dependency between sharing what I have learned in the form of source code and permitting its use in the commission of evils including but not limited to genocide, or participating in my own exploitation by unimaginably wealthy corporations which, incidentally, are also active participants in the commission of evils including but not limited to genocide.
(It’s probably no surprise that I’m also not a fan of forcing a dependency between funding for essential government services and funding a genocide)
In Russia, there was a fundamental difference between the contradiction resolved by the February Revolution and the contradiction resolved by the October Revolution, as well as between the methods used to resolve them. […]
The dogmatists do not observe this principle; they do not understand that conditions differ in different kinds of revolution and so do not understand that different methods should be used to resolve different contradictions; on the contrary, they invariably adopt what they imagine to be an unalterable formula and arbitrarily apply it everywhere, which only causes setbacks to the revolution or makes a sorry mess of what was originally well done.
The conditions of today differ from the conditions of 1983 as they differ from the conditions of 1998. The contradictions of today differ from the contradictions of 1983 as they differ from the contradictions of 1998.
If you are a software developer who wants to share what you have learned for the educational benefit of others in the world, but are uncomfortable with the strings attached by open source software licensing, I invite you to reject the dogmatists, and to renew and share the experiences of your social practice.
We do ourselves and the revolutionary struggle a great disservice if we do not begin to realize that our concrete work […] must be put into writing for the benefit of all the world, especially ourselves.
We must constantly sum up our work, our revolutionary efforts, our social practices so that we might learn what is correct and positive and what must be further developed.
At the same time we must discard that which is irrelevant and negative. To assume that the Bolsheviks, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cubans, the Algerians and other revolutionaries have not made mistakes from which they profited is not to understand that there are no blueprints for revolutions.
The concrete work that we do in the final analysis is the basis for truth.