cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.mlEU OS
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    12 days ago

    As I wrote in the thread about this last month on !linux@lemmy.ml:

    I wonder how much work is entailed in transforming Fedora in to a distro that meets some definition of the word “Sovereign” 🤔

    Personally I wouldn’t want to make a project like this be dependent on the whims of a US defense contractor like RedHat/IBM, especially after what happened with CentOS.

    and, re: “what do you mean ‘redhat is a defense contractor’?!”: here are some links.

    screenshot of RedHat PDF saying: Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge.
Deploy on any aircraft, pod,
sensor, or C2 node
 Ability to comply with
cybersecurity requirements
Executive summary
The U.S. Air Force and its mission partners are fielding new mission capabilities on airframes and
command-and-control (C2) nodes to compress the kill chain. The find, fix, track, target, engage,
assess (F2T2EA) process requires ubiquitous access to data at the strategic, operational and tactical
levels. Red Hat® Device Edge embeds captured, analyzed, and federated data sets in a manner that
positions the warfighter to use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to increase the
accuracy of airborne targeting and mission-guidance systems. Challenges of edge computing on
aircraft and other tactical C2 edge nodes include delivering consistent capabilities on diverse
hardware (new and old, connected and disconnected), meeting airworthiness security requirements,
and efficiently sustaining software at scale. The Air Force can meet these requirements with
Red Hat Device Edge, the edge-optimized software platform that is hardware agnostic.
Opportunity: Use edge technology to defeat the adversary
The Air Force and its partners are developing innovative capabilities on airborne and ground systems
to gain battlespace advantage, including:
 Coalescing and stratifying data to feed AI/ML at the edge to increase the accuracy of
targeting and mission-guidance systems and compresses the mean time to detect (MTTD),
make sense and act across all warfighter domains.
 Delivering near real-time data from sensor pods directly to airmen, accelerating the
sensor-to-shooter cycle.
 Supporting Agile Combat Employment (ACE) in the highly contested
21st-century battlespace.
 Sharing near real-time sensor fusion data with joint and multinational forces to increase
awareness, survivability, and lethality.
“With Red Hat Device
Edge Lockheed Martin
is leading the infusion
of cutting-edge
commercial technology
into military capabilities
that deliver advanced
solutions to our
customers. Unlocking
these AI technologies
can help national
security decision
makers stay ahead of
adversaries, enabling
a safer and more
secure world.”
Justin Taylor
Vice President, F-22 technology,
Lockheed Martin 1
1 Red Hat press release. “Lockheed Martin, Red Hat Collaborate to Advance Artificial Intelligence for Military Missions,”
25 Oct. 2022.

    (source)


  • Nope.

    Nope, it is.

    It allows someone to use code without sharing the changes of that code. It enables non-free software creators like Microsoft to take the code, use it however they like, and not have to share back.

    This is correct; it is a permissive license.

    This is what Free Software prevents.

    No, that is what copyleft (aims to) prevent.

    Tired of people calling things like MIT and *BSD true libre/Free Software.

    The no True Scotsman fallacy requires a lack of authority about what what constitutes “true” - but in the case of Free/Libre software, we have one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition

    If you look at this license list (maintained by the Free Software Foundation’s Licensing and Compliance Lab) you’ll see that they classify many non-copyleft licenses as “permissive free software licenses”.

    They’re basically one step away from no license at all.

    Under the Berne Convention of 1886, everything is copyrighted by default, so “no license at all” means that nobody has permission to redistribute it :)

    The differences between permissive free software licenses and CC0 or a simple declaration that something is “dedicated to the public domain” are subtle and it’s easy to see them as irrelevant, but the choice of license does have consequences.

    The FSF recommends that people who want to use a permissive license choose Apache 2.0 “for substantial programs” because of its clause which “prevents patent treachery”, while noting that that clause makes it incompatible with GPLv2. For “simple programs” when the author wants a permissive license, FSF recommends the Expat license (aka the MIT license).

    It is noteworthy that the latter is compatible with GPLv2; MIT-licensed programs can be included in a GPLv2-only work (like the Linux kernel) while Apache 2.0-licensed programs cannot. (GPLv3 is more accommodating and allows patent-related additional restrictions to be applied, so it is compatible with Apache 2.0.)




  • I often see Rust mentioned at the same time as MIT-type licenses. Is it just a cultural thing that people who write Rust dislike Libre licenses?

    The word “libre” in the context of licensing exists to clarify the ambiguity of the word “free”, to emphasize that it means “free as in freedom” rather than “free as in beer” (aka no cost, or gratis) as the FSF explains here.

    The MIT license is a “libre” license, because it does meet the Free Software Definition.

    I think the word you are looking for here is copyleft: the MIT license is a permissive license, meaning it is not a copyleft license.

    I don’t know enough about the Rust community to say why, but from a distance my impression is that yes they do appear to have a cultural preference for permissive licenses.





  • Fuck this project, but… their source code can be free and open source even if they distribute binaries which aren’t. (Which they can do if they own the copyright, and/or if it is under a permissive non-copyleft FOSS license.)

    And if the source code is actually FOSS, and many people actually want to use it, someone else will distribute FOSS binaries without this stupid EULA. So, this BS is still much better than a non-FOSS license like FUTO’s.


  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.mlOpen source maintenance fee
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    1 month ago

    I immediately knew this was going to be from Microsoft users, and yeah… of course, it is.

    Binaries distributed under this EULA do not meet the free software definition or open source definition.

    However, unlike most attempts to dilute the concept of open source, since the EULA is explicitly scoped to binaries and says it is meant to be applied to projects with source code that is released under an OSI-approved license, I think the source code of projects using this do still meet the open source definition (as long as the code is actually under such a license). Anyone/everyone should still be free to fork any project using this, and to distribute free binaries which are not under this EULA.

    This EULA obviously cannot be applied to projects using a copyleft license, unless all contributors to it have dual-licensed their contributions to allow (at least) the entity that is distributing non-free binaries under this EULA to do so.

    I think it is extremely short-sighted to tell non-paying “consumers” of an open source project that their bug reports are not welcome. People who pay for support obviously get to heavily influence which bugs get priority, but to tell non-paying users that they shouldn’t even report bugs is implicitly communicating that 2nd and 3rd party collaboration on fixing bugs is not expected or desired.

    A lot of Microsoft-oriented developers still don’t understand the free software movement, and have been trying to twist it into something they can comprehend since it started four decades ago. This is the latest iteration of that; at least this time they aren’t suggesting that people license their source code under non-free licenses.