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