Post
Topic
Board Speculation (Altcoins)
Re: [XMR] Monero Speculation
by
ArticMine
on 15/05/2016, 21:22:34 UTC
...

ArticMine it is pitiful that you are a Copy-leftist, who believes in viral licenses and forcing free software. You Communist. As Eric Raymond says, "stop all the oppressive licenses and use permissive licences. You are scaring the fuck out of the corporate world, and not without their justified reason to be scared". I prefer the Unlicense. You kill open source with that Richard Stallman Communism, because then for-profits are scared to use open source.

I deleted the post. On the subject of copyleft I remain a strong supporter of strong copyleft software licenses.

As for equating copyleft software licensing with communism, nothing can be further from the truth. In fact copyleft software licensing particularly the GPL v3 and AGPL v3 can be a very powerful weapon against the very kind of censorship that was prevalent in say the Soviet Union of the 1950's and still is in prevalent in China today.  What difference is there if one's ideas or entrepreneurship is censored by the Soviet Politburo or the Apple iTunes Censor Board. It is still censored and a significant percentage of the world's population is denied access to the ideas or the entrepreneurship. In some cases both types of censorship work together as when Apple used its DRM to censor the teachings of the Dalai Lama at the behest of the Communist Government of China. http://www.pcworld.com/article/185604/article.html This by the way is the very same DRM that Apple currently uses to censor the Monero project, and Apple used to censor Bitcoin from 2009 - 2014.  Furthermore Apple used the same DRM again to frustrate a perfectly legitimate anti-terrorism investigation, until the FBI found a third party who could crack the DRM.

Monero doesn't use any copyleft licenses and doesn't have any plans to so it is kind of off topic.


On the surface this of course is true; however if one digs deeper one finds that strong copyleft licenses such as the the GPL v3 and AGPL v3 are critical in frustrating and preventing the kind of DRM that when combined a proprietary operating system can easily break the fungibility and privacy of Monero for the majority of users. If the Operating system is compromised all the secret keys are available to the DRM / proprietary software overlord regardless of how many mixins one uses.

Here are some sobering thoughts. One company Microsoft controls, over 90% of all computer operating systems in the world. This same company is moving towards locked bootloaders, has highly invasive DRM built right into its proprietary operating system and is also a founding member of the PRISM program. A second company, Apple, controls over 7% of the remaining computer operating systems. this company is also a member of the PRISM program and has already censored content at the behest of totalitarian governments. This leaves under 2% of all computers in the world under the actual control of their users. The latter run operating systems that are dominated by strong copyleft software licenses.

If Microsoft and Apple are scared of copyleft that is a very good thing in order to preserve freedom.  
 
Edit 1: sockpuppet1: Apology accepted, thanks

Edit 2: This is very positive. Microsoft may have already blinked by letting the GNU (GPL v3) into the heart of Windows. https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-on-ubuntu-on-windows/

Edit 3

...
Monero = Communism.

Nothing is further from the truth.

As for: Proprietary Software and DRM = Communism, that is not true either. Proprietary Software and DRM offer most the disadvantages of Communism with none of its benefits.