@refobj: I agree, some of the names picked by IT-nerds sound somewhat immature to people. I think that's a cultural thing, partly a reaction to the pompous fake seriousness of some of the non-nerds in the industry, partly due to the generally more informal language used in the US-american tech culture that still dominates. So changing that would be hard, and maybe people should look more at substance and less at names anyway.
And don't take the comments to your post personally, we are probably mostly snarky european man-bear-pigs here. :-)
I'm still screaming bloody murder about GitHub (to which most people here are addicted worse than heroin) injecting communist blind-faith-in-government anti-Internet-freedom propaganda in everyone's code.
To retaliate, I'll have my libraries randomly inject chapters from Ayn Rand / Milton Friedman / Murray Rothbard / Reason Magazine / etc into whatever strings they touch!
Ok, I wouldn't. Two wrongs don't make a right...
I am not on a crusade to take away anyone's left-wing utopia, only to preserve my right to not be a part of it.
Some individuals and organizations (ex. Richard Stallman, FSF, and most recently GitHub) have crossed a line in polluting the free software ecosystem with calls for government force. So some people (including myself) will not use them. And if you come onto my (hypothetical) seastead to impose your software or network regulations - that is an act of war.
If you want a project that is genuine free software, avoid the licenses (see copyfree.org) and addictive proprietary platforms that call for government force.
Then everyone can use and contribute to your project. Including "the good communists", who sit in their voluntary commune NGOs, abide by the Non-Aggression Principle, and not loot or enslave those outside it. And then nobody gets nuked. ;)
First of all, even in a hypothetical discussion, there's not one "AnCap-istan" but a free market of a zillion jurisdictions competing for subscribers, trade, patronage, etc. Some would have different explicit contractual agreements than others, including on the construct of copyrights, software licenses, patents, etc. I see some self-proclaimed AnCaps carrying iPhones, and they'd probably sign away their firstborn to Apple for the next year's model - but that's on them...
I for one never signed any contract agreeing to obey any legalese in whatever supposedly "free" code I happen to step in, as decided by government-monopoly courts. This becomes increasingly significant as more and more of my life becomes 1s and 0s, and your Nim libraries get compiled into my brain. I want Libmania (my own hypothetical sovereign little AnCap empire, with assets in many asteroid fields and pleasure palaces circling the sun) to be completely free from all legal entanglements to The Green Happy Equal Ubuntu Planet (formerly known as Earth), wishing it peace, collective kumbaya, and lots of panda hugs for all.
A real contract must involve an explicit, serious, verifiable oath - like going to a contract enforcement agency, paying them a fee, leaving behind a time-checksummed DNA sample, verbally reciting the agreement, pinky-swearing before an array of highdef x-ray cameras, and kissing the forehead on a golden bust of Saint Kinsella. Yes, all parties to the agreement have to kiss the same bust.
If you believe that any text automagically becomes a contract, then you are hereby informed that my post here is protected by DMCAGPLOMGv99+, and your brain cells that have copied it while reading must now obey my terms! ::evil laugh:: :P
Moral of the story: just use a copyfree license like MIT, Boost, Unlicense, etc and you won't have tactless annoying AnCap a**hole rants making you read theoretical political philosophy dissertations that freak everybody out.
And switch to NimHub. What do you mean I didn't write one yet? Oh, right...
EDIT (after the thread was locked):
One mistake I made in this thread is not explaining what GitHub exactly did, and how this has made Nim less "warm" (ref thread title) and less inviting for what could have been its major target audience: the people who appreciate the Nim ecosystem's libertarian virtues, like being #1 in license permissiveness.
GitHub inserted obnoxious political banners calling for government regulation of the Internet (like in Communist China) on top of every single page on their site. This was only targeted at users with USA'n IPs (and maybe with some other targeting), so many people (and archiving sites) have missed it.
Other Nim devs don't seem to have a problem with that, and continue to make GitHub an unavoidable part of Nim. This means that I cannot continue to invest my time in using and advocating Nim... :(
BTW, did this thread get started by someone who got censored or self-deleted? Much confusion (even before I made it worse). There are much less bad ways for the forum software to handle that...
Either way, snapshotting is always a good idea - https://archive.is/5tk9Q
Dear StasB,
First and foremost, please note that I am criticizing your argument against my position on NAP and "copyfree"dom advocacy, not you personally.
Also please keep in mind that this isn't a fully off-topic discussion for this forum, because Nim's ecosystem ranks #1 in "copyfree"dom - ahead of every other language I've analyzed! (Only Julia has a higher percentage of copyfree packages, but it loses tons of points for lack of OS portability and a ton of uncopyfree dependencies for the interpreter itself.) This can be a marginal but nonetheless noteworthy additional "selling point" for Nim advocacy, and thus I encourage all Nim module writers to stick to copyfree licenses like MIT.
Personally, I think all libraries should be named after dead dictators. That always gives me serious feelings. Just a small personal opinion.
Sarcasm was initiated here. If there had been a Non-Sarcasm Principle, then I'd claim self-defense. :P
OK, so this is a thread about subjective, opinion-based, cultural reactions to non-technical aspects of Nim and its developer ecosystem. I've contributed my position, which is the N.A.P.
I just checked my code for communism, but I couldn't find it. Do I need special glasses for it?
It's not about "communism". And even if (hypothetically) North Korea uses my software in its nuclear warheads - well, that's an unavoidable potential side-effect of making it free.
It's about things that have tangible consequences, like licenses and needless institutional entanglements (like GitHub, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc).
And so, when "checking your code for communism" (that is, for the things that I object to), check the legalese that one would supposedly become subject to by using it, including all dependencies.
Nim itself is an example of genuinely free software: it builds on a free OS (ex. Liberty BSD, HaikuOS, and soon my own OS/NAP) with a free compiler (ex. clang, pcc) and no restrictively licensed dependencies (except for optional modules like SSL). I doubt that anyone thinks that's a bad thing. But even installing many modules from nimble requires git (GPL), and even contacting many of the devs requires signing up with GitHub.
Even if a Nim module is written by $(insert your most hated group here), you can simply "grab the source code and run". One can fork all the copyfree components of the Nim ecosystem (without misrepresenting their origin), put them outside of the untrustworthy mousetrap that is GitHub, and change all module names as one sees fit.
You mean you don't like the fact that you can get sued if you make use of GPL'd stuff while violating the GPL license? Interesting.
True, I don't like that fact - as a matter of principle. I disagree with both the aims and the means of GPL, and wish to work towards the creation of a better new free software philosophy.
That doesn't mean I want to closed-source-fork your code and pretend that I wrote it. This insinuation can be refuted very thoroughly if needed.
Do they have contracts and intellectual property in Ancapistan [...]
AnCap 101: We'd obviously have contracts. NAP is the microkernel of the free society, and everything that runs on top of it is a contract (or informal voluntary human action, but that only scales so far before you need a contract).
IP, on the other hand, is very different from both physical property and a contract. It claims legitimate use of force just because the 1s and 0s on my physical property resemble yours, even if there is no contract between us (and even regardless of whether you can prove damage, etc).
Maybe contractually-based IP and its enforcement in "Ancapistan" (an alliance of a zillion sovereign NAP-abiding start-up nations) would be even higher than the current average under involuntary governments. Maybe you won't be able to get into a decent Ancapi university or buy a home in a respectable neighborhood without signing a contract that imports (via like a nimble for contract modules) standardized IP obligations.
I don't have a crystal ball. Anarcho-Capitalism, like science, is about the process, not any predetermined conclusions. We shall see...
If I haven't yet answered this above (despite my lazy stupid verbosity and talentless attempts at literary charm), then the Stephan Kinsella reference should have been sufficient. There are many right-libertarians 50+ IQ points above me on all sides of the IP issues, and you are better off reading them instead of me.
or is anyone just allowed to do whatever they like with the work of others when said work is digital?
You should clarify what you mean by "allowed". If there are no laws to throw one in prison for picking one's nose in public, does that mean it's "allowed"? There are social consequences to everything. No one likes a plagiarist. It would come out sooner or later (with technological aid most likely sooner) and be very bad for one's career and business prospects.
In practice you won't find many examples of companies profiting from closed-source-forking free software unless they've added a huge value of additional work, which is the cause of their profit. To the contrary, software companies have voluntarily spent billions of dollars to give away free software in order to build good PR, like advertising, without any need for the GPL mentality of "legal" force.
[...] can you tell apart that which can be attributed to your own efforts from that which can only be attributed to the efforts of others?
Human beings are fallible and biased in their individual favor, so it would be best if we had impartial software systems (DVCS, blockchain-backed P2P web archives, search engines, etc) to keep track of this for us. A sufficiently advanced AI with access to such a timestamped repository of human thought would probably shock all of us with just how unoriginal all our ideas are. So what?
There's also a limit to how far attribution of efforts can be measured. All human achievement is a consequence of earlier civilization. I'm pretty sure that most words in the English language have been invented by others, for example, and the phonological building blocks have been around for millions of years. So what?
This doesn't automatically subjugate me to anything.
If you walk down the street and you run into a newspaper stand, do you feel entitled to grab a newspaper and make use of it (as opposed to simply looking at it while it's in a public place) because you never explicitly agreed to pay for it? No, because it's not yours, and you don't know if you have permission to do so.
This is not a fitting analogy in the slightest, because a newspaper and a newspaper stand are physical property. There is a limit to how many people can stand in front of a newspaper stand - a privilege afforded by its owner than can be revoked at her discretion. A less bad analogy would ask if I "feel entitled" to download a digital copy of a newspaper on The Pirate Bay (or equivalent), for which the same kind of physical scarcity doesn't apply - but this is still not what I'm advocating!
A valid "newspaper"-like analogy would be me choosing to only read Wikinews (which can be freely copied and only requires attribution) and equivalently "permissive" / "public domain" news. (Note: requiring attribution via a license can in theory also involve government force, but this is inconsequential in practice, especially for software. I let copyfree.org decide where the line is.)
Since you've brought my own character into question: it is very well documented that I've previously supported free content producers I really liked with voluntary donations (ex. $100/month FTL, before they started disappoint...). (And someday I'll start supporting free software again. (Most likely Nim. (When I am good and ready.) Someday...))
By the same token, you don't get to make free use of the work of others, even if it's in digital form. You seek permission first, which often comes in the form of a license, and it details the conditions that you must agree to (if any) if you want to make use of the work in question.
It's not "by the same token", as I explained above. Speaking of which, did you "seek permission" before "making free use" of the term "by the same token"? :P
If you need "permission first", then it's not really "free software". "Freedom" means no restrictions, like the English language; not free as in "free phone when you sign a contract".
So you're still missing an argument for why "intellectual property" is universal law that trumps my physical property rights and justifies force. (Don't worry, lacking such an argument puts you in very good company, like Ayn Rand.) But what you're really lacking is an argument against my criticism of restrictive software and services, which is the actual subject at hand.
Failure to abide by the conditions is evidence that you're using someone else's work without permission at best, or that you are perfectly aware of the conditions and choose to violate them fraudulently at worst.
Epic logic fail!
I am not "failing to abide", I am arguing against and avoiding / boycotting. My big upcoming project is OS/NAP, an open source Unix distro + ports collection + original software that doesn't violate the Non-Aggression Principle.
Like other consistently-principled libertarians, I object to all examples of government force. Objecting to US interventionism in the Middle East isn't "evidence" that you're a Jihadi terrorist. Objecting to Iran's use of death penalty for sodomy isn't "evidence" of one's homosexuality. Objecting to "bake the cake" laws that violate freedom of association / religious conscience isn't "evidence" of homophobia. Objecting to the "War On Drugs" isn't "evidence" that you're a drug dealer. Etc, etc, etc.
By your logic, I'd have to be all those things - all at the same time! :o
What I am is a diehard free software advocate, but I come from a very different philosophical foundation than the likes of Richard Stallman, who have been a diabolical cyclopean early influence on free software. They hate free market capitalism, and have been using whatever means they can against it: licenses, regulations, legislation, etc, etc, etc. Advocating fully open and unencumbered ("permissive" / "copyfree" / "public domain") software makes me more, not less of a free software advocate than Stallman! ::roar!::
And please, for the love of God, don't write 40 paragraphs. Just tell me which statements you disagree with and we'll proceed methodically.
Epic logic fail!
I am not "failing to abide"
Are you sure it's not an "epic" reading comprehension fail on you part? I never said you are violating the GPL by arguing against it/boycotting GPL'd software.
@Araq: Too bad there isn't a place to transfer off-topic discussions to. I think Libman should have his own subforum, to collect his extensive literature.
This forum is Araq's property, so this conversation here is over. Please don't reply, as this thread getting bumped would increase its annoyance.
I apologise that I've gotten drawn into a debate where it isn't appropriate. I'm confident that I've made a correct, complete, and thorough argument that requires no further clarification. You are free to disagree. The end.
This thread has turned off-topic and so I'm going to lock it (any further posts to this thread will be deleted).
@libman I would kindly ask you to stop derailing threads into ramblings about how GitHub is communist and other such topics, stick to Nim please. I dislike removing posts so I will keep everything said here alive, but know that in the future somebody else might beat me to the punch and just remove the whole thing.