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bkm | 3 years ago

Not a cryptophobe, but his rule seems reasonable: 'use it, but you won't get support if you use it for things I don't like'. Certainly better than the 'you may only use this product if you support/disavow $x' emerging trend in 'OSS' README's.

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jobigoud|3 years ago

I have the same philosophy. I make an open source video analysis software, mainly used for sports technique but occasionally I get requests from people that use it in the context of hunting animals which I disapprove of. I just don't provide support in these case.

np_tedious|3 years ago

> I will summarily close issues related to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in any way.

Why would any issue be "about" crypto? Or traditional finance. Or social media. Or recipe websites. Or gardening

I'm not understanding why the content of the website / application would be an important detail of a github issue at all.

shrimpx|3 years ago

No, I think it’s more like “I’m trying to connect to this Bitcoin tracker with your library and it doesn’t work, help pls”

samthecoy|3 years ago

Could you give some examples of this trend? (Not aware of it, personally—curious to see an example)

st_goliath|3 years ago

A while ago, some licenses started cropping up that tried to disallow certain use. E.g. the anti ICE license, anti-996 license and similar.

Bruce Perens wrote about this in late 2019[1][2], specifically focusing on the "hippocratic license", proponents of which IIRC at the time attempted to spark a debate if the Open Source definition needs to be changed, to allow discrimination like this.

[1] https://perens.com/2019/10/12/invasion-of-the-ethical-licens...

[2] https://perens.com/2019/09/23/sorry-ms-ehmke-the-hippocratic...

rvz|3 years ago

I haven't seen any example of such a trend which is why this is a very extreme position if not an irrational position to take.

> I’m aware of efforts to build proof-of-stake models. I’ll care once the total energy consumption of all cryptocurrencies drops to a non-bullshit level.

> I will summarily close issues related to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in any way.

Have we seen any creator of a deep learning library, take a similar position if not stopping any support for anyone using it for mass surveillance or burning up the planet by using their deep learning library to train it on tons of GPUs in the cloud until the data centres catch fire? I don't think so.

It's business as usual for them as the author is getting upset over PoW systems to taint all of them under the same brush despite many alternatives that are more energy efficient than others.

JD557|3 years ago

I'm not sure if I would call it a trend, but I would say projects released under under "Ethical Licenses" (such as the Anti-Capitalist Software License (ACSL)[1] or the Do No Harm License[2]) might fit the "you may only use this product if you support/disavow $x" description.

1: https://anticapitalist.software/

2: https://github.com/raisely/NoHarm