Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

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Licenses are about choices. I do not want 7 year old girls to be sued. I don't want people to go to jail for helping others to take part in culture and enjoy art.

I want children (or everyone?) to have access to all of culture, knowledge and art regardless of their parents wealth. I want that researcher has access to research papers and software technology in order to enable the improvement of the human race, especially on the medical side.

I want life-critical and life-saving technology to be transparent and verifiable. I want technology that can be repaired and not arbitrary prevented from being repaired. I want that people have the ability to remove malicious code from devices that they own.

I do not want 20 years long government enforced monopolies on vague concepts. I do not want multiple lifetimes worth of government enforced monopolies on concrete art, culture and life-improving technologies.

People who want to use code for good with commercial interests could sign an agreement that follow those above wishes, including additional corner cases or obvious bad behavior which I might have forgotten. Alternative I can use a license that get me as close as I can using preexisting understanding of those licenses.

> to use code for good with commercial interests

You can use GPL code commercially. You just have to publish source on anything it touches. It that makes your business model nonviable, the amount of good you were doing is... questionable.

I disagree with "have to publish source on anything it touches" . Electronic Arts used WebKit in multiple games and they only had to share changes they did to it, not the source codes for all their games.

As a side effect they had to publish their incomplete implementation of STL that was adopted by multiple other studios as it was so much faster and less memory fragmenting than alternatives.

WebKit is LGPL though, not GPL, and it was built as a specially maintained dynamic library specifically to avoid having to publish the source code for the whole game.

Webkit is LGPL, not GPL - not having to share linked code is exactly the main difference between these licenses.

WebKit is a mixture of LGPL and BSD, not pure GPL.

"People who want to use code for good with commercial interests could sign an agreement that follow those above wishes"

WI absolitely support the idea of getting comoanies to contribute to OSS they use, but in most cases the projects are not prepared for this.

There is no obvious standard way to pay that I could take to my boss

a.k.a. "For God's sake, think of the children!!!1!"

Many games are designed towards the younger part of the population.

But I am not sold on the idea that only children have a right to culture, art and knowledge regardless of social economic status. There is plenty of good arguments in favor of giving everyone equal access regardless of the ability to pay. The issue tend to come to how society should then go around incentivize and enable those who produce such culture, art and knowledge.

The struggle for economic justice and the equality of persons is not universally admired, so we have to start somewhere. Not suing children for accessing culture, art and knowledge is such start, and it would be great if the law recognized that.

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