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• @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 2026-11-09 08:40

  @datarama@hachyderm.io Around 25 years ago I found myself in a lot of discussions with GNU people. A lot of them had the libertarian view that all rights descended from property rights. The government needed to enforce contracts and that was it, everything else could be built outside of government control. If this view sounds familiar, it was one of the arguments the Confederacy made to justify owning slaves. Some Libertarians are overt about this: they believe everyone should have the right to become a slave and completely ignore all of the external pressures that would lead to this. The GPL is a manifestation of this world view. It takes a set of social, economic, and technical problems (how do you create an ecosystem where software respects the needs of end users and empowers them to do what they want with computers?) and claims that the solution is a legal contract. And, once you have the legal document, you don’t need to address the social problems, the economic incentives, or the software-engineering challenges that would actually create the world that you claim you want to see. And then you spend the next few decades wondering why a complex legal document seems to have empowered the entities that can afford to pay the most lawyers. But you do notice it, so you double down and create more complex legal documents, because legal documents are the tool that you use to solve problems.

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