Tolerance, right up to the limit where it actually starts hurting, is the best strategy for a peaceful and prosperous society. Trying to carve out little patches for your type of people and excluding that scary, evil other does not work. We're at Enlightenment+200 years here. I suppose shouldn't have to try make a defence of tolerating different opinions. If they want to license their software however then good luck to them, but nonetheless attempting to encode illiberal political beliefs into a software license is the wrong direction. The GPL is exactly the right approach. Freedom consistently outperforms all the ideas people swear are going to work better than freedom.
Marginalised communities are not protected by documents that claim to protect marginalised communities. Fat lot of good documents have ever done. What protects marginalised communities is actual tolerance of differing opinions, and actual freedom. Ditto what protects us from surveillance. Fat lot of good all the paper protections against surveillance have done. Look at what America has built! Let alone China. Once again, the problem is a knee-jerk overreaction and paranoia in the ruling class when the correct answer is tolerance. Ditto weapons. Did Afghanistan benefit from code of conducts? No, what it needed was a bulkwork of people who said "lets really stretch ourselves not to hurt people who dislike us" at a critical moment.
This license won't do what it claims. Best case, it is GPL+Fluff. Worst case, it becomes an exclusionary political tool. Ironically, it is likely that it will be wielded against marginalised communities.
Funny you mention that page, because before posting the question «Which definition of 'liberal' are you using» I went to that very page to try to try and find an interpretation that fit the context. But nothing answered it clearly. So, that remains insufficient.
If the use of 'liberal' was meant to refer to the defence of freedom of speech, there exist a problem in the discrimination between "speech" as intended in the formula and «manipulat[ion]» as written in that licence. But was that the idea? We should not be here to guess.
There wasn't a specific liberal principle I was thinking of. If you want more of an itemised list, I've gone through the "generally supported" list at the start of the wiki article and listed the basic issues I was inferring from s7r's original post were:
* Anti-democratic (in that they privilege the copyright holders political views)
* Anti-secular/anti-religious-freedom (in that they privilege the copyright holders values and would likely exclude people based on religious values in conflict with the CoC).
* Anti-free-speech (in that they would deny access to their work based on what people say).
* Anti-market economy (in that they aren't providing a tool/service to anyone equally based on a free market).
Which isn't to say they're bad people or anything, liberalism isn't the be-all and end-all. But the GPL is a neat embodiment of some very good ideas from the liberal tradition and this ml5js library license is much less liberal than the GPL. And also worse.
> Tolerance, right up to the limit where it actually starts hurting, is the best strategy for a peaceful and prosperous society.
It really is not. Unbounded tolerance is how free and open societies commit suicide and succumb to authoritarian regimes where intolerance is the norm.
> If they want to license their software however then good luck to them, but nonetheless attempting to encode illiberal political beliefs into a software license is the wrong direction. The GPL is exactly the right approach.
You're just asserting that refusing to help out authoritarian and outright xenophobic political movements further their goals "is the wrong approach" without any rationale or insight or argument at all.
Meanwhile, you're citing the GPL which is a highly political license.
>> Tolerance, right up to the limit where it actually starts hurting, is the best strategy for a peaceful and prosperous society.
> It really is not. Unbounded tolerance is how free and open societies commit suicide and succumb to authoritarian regimes where intolerance is the norm.
This is a non sequitur. GP placed a bound on tolerance.
> You're just asserting that refusing to help out authoritarian and outright xenophobic political movements further their goals "is the wrong approach" without any rationale or insight or argument at all.
GP can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think he has asserted anything of the kind. In fact, I suspect he's somewhat opposed to the same, since he's opposed to "illiberal political beliefs" which are themselves quite aligned with "xenophobic political movements".
In any case, I think you've entirely missed the pragmatic points of the GP's post, which is that such illiberal policies are, throughout history, used against the marginalized peoples they are ostensibly intended to protect. Given your previous statement about unbounded tolerance, it feels like you should be in agreement with the GP on this point; unless you're saying we should just skip the tolerance and go straight to intolerance.
> And to allow discriminating against "wrong" opinions is how intolerance becomes the norm.
Do you feel that plotting to overthrow a democracy to install a totalitarian despot while discussing political assassinations is a grey area that's up for debate whether it's "wrong" or indeed undoubtedly wrong?
I mean, considering how this very same political group killed police officers during their coup attempt, where do you personally draw the line on murder?
Obviously that's a hard question with no perfect solution. That being said, I don't think _talking_ about something should be illegal. You and I talking about how to assassinate someone shouldn't be enough to put us away for years. Doing something or attempting to do something is where I draw the line.
Now, of course, I see the problem of letting people freely talk about killing people, overthrowing the government or running concentration camps. But forbidding this kind of speech is not going to prevent it if the pull is strong enough; even worse, it's going to strengthen their narrative about oppression. Instead, it should be possible to openly discuss why this is wrong. To understand why someone has an opinion and showing him why that trade-off is not worth it is far better than trying to forbid even thinking about it.
Now, I know that our action prevention might need some form of surveillance to prevent radical groups from taking actions and, at its worst, might fail to prevent some unnecessary violence. In my opinion, though, we can have much more freedom and maybe even prevent more people from radicalizing than by trying to censor wrong thoughts.
The problem is that once you have that loophole in the ideals of free speech, people start calling everyone they disagree with "intolerant" in order to feel good about themselves while shutting down the speech of people who disagree with them.
What would you think would work if an authoritarian political movement plagued with xenophobia wants to use your work as a key tool to start imposing on tolerant people?
Marginalised communities are not protected by documents that claim to protect marginalised communities. Fat lot of good documents have ever done. What protects marginalised communities is actual tolerance of differing opinions, and actual freedom. Ditto what protects us from surveillance. Fat lot of good all the paper protections against surveillance have done. Look at what America has built! Let alone China. Once again, the problem is a knee-jerk overreaction and paranoia in the ruling class when the correct answer is tolerance. Ditto weapons. Did Afghanistan benefit from code of conducts? No, what it needed was a bulkwork of people who said "lets really stretch ourselves not to hurt people who dislike us" at a critical moment.
This license won't do what it claims. Best case, it is GPL+Fluff. Worst case, it becomes an exclusionary political tool. Ironically, it is likely that it will be wielded against marginalised communities.