On 2022-08-16 15:31, doug demaio wrote:
Richard Brown wrote:
On Tue, 2022-08-16 at 08:00 +0000, doug demaio wrote:
People who write open-source software have no say over how it is used. There are many positive ways Tornado Cash was used, which you can hear about, but I'll just share one. The license of the openSUSE Project says otherwise
I see your point, but that's assuming people take that code or software and act in good faith. What happened here wasn't that. It was someone making a privacy protocol and someone didn't act in good faith, so the powers that be chose to penalized the use because of the bad actors involvement, outlaw the use of that code and vilify the developer who made it. It would be like some bad actor using flatpaks to create something not acceptable and now all the sudden some of us can't interact with flatpaks because the powers that be find it too dangerous. Then they make the developer of it an outlaw. This is basically what happened.
Sure but the “good faith” argument doesn’t really fly for me either I believe libdvdcss was written in good faith, but there’s no question it does something that is legally controversial and that’s why we don’t allow it anywhere near our Projects repos There’s tons of open source information security tools that were written in good faith and are often used in good faith, but are considered “Hacking tools” under German law and so we also don’t allow them on OBS (yet another example of existing restrictions applied to open source) If we could use patent encumbered open source codecs in good faith we’d have them in the distro now.. wouldn’t we?
It's harder for me to share sympathy or support for the cause of this thread when such fundemental errors are cited as quote.
Perhaps you just needed more context. This type of event should be concerning and it has my attention.
This event doesn’t concern me any more than any of the previous FOSS legal controversies Just because something is open source doesn’t enable its use to skirt the laws of the lands And some countries make really stupid laws And some countries enforce them stupidly It’s a minefield, but one we navigate daily and have navigated for years. The only question this incident raises for me is a casual pondering as to whether we will need to treat cryptocurrency tools in a similar way to “hacking” tools, patented codecs, and libdvdcss and keep them out of openSUSE to avoid legal entanglements. -- Richard Brown Linux Distribution Engineer - Future Technology Team SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, D-90461 Nuremberg, Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Managing Directors/Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Martje Boudien Moerman