US government reportedly probes China’s use of RISC-V
www.theregister.com
Permissive licenses may be about to collide with geopolitics
  • BrikoXEnglish
    29·
    8 months ago

    <…> the representatives wrote in a November 2023 letter that called for creation of a “robust ecosystem for open source collaboration among the US and our allies while ensuring the PRC is unable to benefit from that work.”

    That’s not how open source works you fucking moron.

    • eleitl@lemmy.ml
      18·
      8 months ago

      If they change the terms of the RISC-V license to include sanctions blacklisting it would just encourage forking and guaranteeing failure of the restricted license in the long term.

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
        5·
        8 months ago

        I mean this is why RISC-V intl. moved to Switzerland, because no one wanted to adopt a US-controlled ISA that they’d arbitrarily cut access to if you didnt align to their geopolitics.

        I don’t know if the US has any power to restrict RISC-V in China, but if it does then RISC-V dies almost immediately after in terms of its potential to supplant ARM and X86

    • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
      5·
      8 months ago

      That’s not how open source works you fucking moron.

      Maybe they’ll go the Bush route and call their new license “freedom source”.

      Or pass a law mandating their new definition of open source.

    • kristoff@infosec.pubEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      That is valid … in peace-time when everybody accepts that.

      The problem is that the reality is a lot complex. Open source only exists, because of the open source licenses. The open source licenses are only valid, because of the copyright legislation. That legislation is only valid, … because the nation-state has determined it is valid.

      Consider a scenario where a nation-state (whatever state that may be, just making a general starement here) decides that for sectors it conciders critical for the state, it -or companies that act on its behalve- are allowrd to use / copy / enclose whatever open source technology they want without being subject to the requirements that come with the opensource license. So they can use whatever open source technology they want but they do not have to return anything to it. They can even use it in closed products.

      How do you propose to handle such a scenario?

      Kr.

      • BrikoXEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        That is an interesting scenario. And of course nobody can prevent abuse of open source projects if legal institutions are abolished or held at metaphorical gunpoint, but even in that case the actual open technology would be still open to others. It would just limit the contributors that contribute back to the project. If x country hard forks the existing project, ignores the license, stops contributing back and starts working on it solo, it would get isolated pretty fast. Nobody wants to do business in a country that offers no legal protections. We even have a recent example of that happening. Russia nationalized a few international businesses and as a result many companies just pull out of the country. Yandex (who was owned by Dutch mega-company), sold out to Russia for half of what they were worth since the risk to keep operating was too high.

        Open source license abuse is nothing new, big companies do that all the time since small volunteer contributors doesn’t have the capital to force compliance.