
The Anti-Capitalist Software License - jarmitage
https://anticapitalist.software/
======
mikl
… or “How to make your software unusable with questionable legalese”.

Not a lawyer, but I can easily imagine how “An organization of people that
seeks shared profit for all its members and does not exploit the labor of non-
members” could be interpreted in dozens of different ways, making the use of
any such licensed software a very dicey proposition.

~~~
slooonz
Pretty sure the authors of that license would consider that a feature
actually.

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TulliusCicero
> all workers are owners with equal share.

How common is this in worker co-operatives? My guess is "doesn't exist
anywhere" \-- I'm guessing there's always some correlation between seniority
and ownership share, even if it's just "you have to pass a short probationary
period before you're an owner".

It sounds like they haven't really thought this through. Besides seniority --
does someone who's worked there for twenty years really deserve the same share
of ownership that someone who started last week does? -- there's also hours to
consider: does someone who works ten or twenty hours a week deserve the same
share as someone who works forty hours a week? I think most would agree that
doesn't really make sense, but the current wording of the license mandates it.

~~~
taneq
> I'm guessing there's always some correlation between seniority and ownership
> share

If not then you could trivially fleece them by joining then immediately
leaving with your share.

~~~
robjan
Usually in a co-op your shareholding only lasts as long as you are a member

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codetrotter
> An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and
> does not exploit the labor of non-members

Sounds basically impossible to me. How do you ensure that you don’t exploit
the labor of non-members? If you buy as much as even an office chair, or a
pencil sharpener, or a carpet, or whatever, there were probably very many
people involved and some of them were being exploited in that they were paid a
very low amount for their work.

~~~
hooby
To me this sounds pretty much like Mondragon:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation)

Rare, but not outright impossible.

~~~
KingOfCoders
Mondragon would not be allowed to use software under this license.

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bb123
This is only worth reading if you take it as a commentary/artwork. If you read
it as a real licence it all feels a little bit childish.

~~~
tgv
That's a deserved, but harsh criticism of modern art.

~~~
throwanem
Harsh, I agree. But deserved? "Modern art" (in the vernacular sense, rather
than the art-history one) seems to me a 'thought-terminating cliché', an
excuse to disdain an entire and rather broad field of endeavor without first
taking the trouble to engage at all with it.

At least that's how I find I most often see it used. Perhaps that's not what
is actually happening here, but nothing I've seen so far distinguishes this
example from any other of the type. Nor do I see any reason why this example
deserves any more favorable consideration than any other.

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jonahbenton
Part of the genius of the work of RMS- his behavioral issues aside- is the
creation out of whole cloth of a legal protocol that is sufficiently precisely
defined, sufficiently operationalizable, and sufficiently defensible as
to...actually work, to have behavioral impacts in the real world. It is hard
to appreciate how incredible an achievement that is.

This license is not that, for all sorts of obvious reasons, which is a shame.
Articulating a set of use principles in the extremely broad area the authors
have an interest in is not impossible. Not only not impossible, but desirable.
Software is leverage, and working to ensure leverage can only be used by the
weaker party in any specific context is part of an equity protocol. If such a
thing is going to exist, someone has to do the work to define it. One hopes
they take a step back and give it another go.

~~~
slowmovintarget
Because RMS rested his edifice on the foundation of ownership in the classical
sense, something that works and is widespread in the real world.

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andyljones
Worth contrasting with other 'Ethos licenses'. There's a really good writeup
of 'common' ones here:

[https://coss.media/advent-of-ethos-licensing/](https://coss.media/advent-of-
ethos-licensing/)

The most famous is the JSON Good-Not-Evil one.

I particularly like the term 'crayon license' for licenses drawn up by people
without experience in writing licenses.

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hooby
I kinda like the idea.

I severely doubt the practically and usability of this.

I would be interested to see an expert lawyers take on how to write this
license, so that it could actually work and hold up in court.

~~~
kevingadd
I've seen comments to the effect that making the license impractical (and non-
lawyer-approved) was intended as a way to ensure big companies like Google
won't touch it. Not sure how I feel about that as a strategy, but there's a
certain logic to it, similar to Crockford's "do no evil" license.

~~~
jonahbenton
It is counter productive.

The GPL is a work of genius in part because it encourages use and propagation.

Creating a stupid license blocks even legitimate users, which prevents the
social program from progressing.

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joshspankit
What about those companies who argue that they don’t _seek_ profit, but that
they profit anyways.

Also: would this then include Amazon pre-2001?

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mhh__
The GPL is not anti-capitalist but it will in some ways stop businesses
profiting of your work withing giving back.

I believe all software should be either some variant of the GPL or
GPL/Commercial dual. The latter is so a company can choose not to comply with
the GPL but still give back to the project (financially).

Anti-capitalism is a strange ideology given recent history. Most flaws pointed
at capitalism today actually stem from problems that most capitalists would
take issue with (corruption, overregulation, underregulation etc.). The people
who built the Soviet Union and other socialist countries weren't stupid, the
task is just impossible.

~~~
bccdee
Anti-capitalists would argue that those problems (corporatism, money-in-
politics, wealth inequality) are inevitable products of capitalism.

Obviously the Soviet model was a failure, but I think it's a bit silly to use
the failure of one competing model as an argument that no other model could
ever succeed.

~~~
zepto
The Soviet model is not proof that no other model could ever succeed.

However it (and other failed communisms) are proof of particular failure
modes. Given that these are the outcomes we know about, they are a reasonable
null hypothesis.

Amongst modern proponents of socialism I have not so far seen anyone actually
say how those failure modes would be avoided.

~~~
bccdee
The failure mode of authoritarian communist regimes was simple. They failed in
the same way that authoritarian capitalist regimes like the Pinochet's Chilean
government did: the people in power didn't care about the well-being of the
general public, and so the economy ultimately collapsed because the needs of
the public weren't being met. This is a problem solved by democracy.

Now, if you want to argue that there are problems with economic planning, I'm
right there with you. I think that market incentives have historically been a
more reliable way of running an economy, and that market socialism [1] is a
much more viable alternative than a state-planned economy. But it's worth
noting that it's hard to make strong claims about the consequences of economic
planning when it's never been implemented in a democratic society.

Regardless, concerns about the failure modes of authoritarian communist states
don't really make sense in the context of market socialism, since it involves
neither authoritarianism nor economic planning.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism)

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amoe_
How would this be applied in the case where the user was a wholly-or-partially
state-funded organization (that was neither military nor law enforcement)?

[clearly hasn't been lawyer-vetted, but any wild guesses?]

~~~
throwanem
At a guess, State or NIAID or NCBI would be permitted to use software with
this license - the distinction appears to be that civil government or NGO is
allowed, while military or LE is not.

Not, I agree, that this would likely prove enforceable as written, but I think
that's what they're going for. And maybe they're _trying_ to elicit a test
case? That makes more sense than some of the speculation at hand, I think.

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jeanlucas
It doesn’t make sense, feels like a teenager approach to the world.

~~~
psoots
Is the GPL not just as teenager-like with its radical openness? Wanting to
maintain your values through a software license feels passive and sneaky and
awkward, but that's how we do it. And if you value your labor and the labor of
others, in a way the GPL does not, why not write that into the license?

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KingOfCoders
Probably doesn't work for many cooperatives that are often a mix of owners and
employees.

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krapp
As I read it, an individual is allowed to use this software to seek a profit,
so it isn't anti-capitalist at all, at best it's anti-corporatist.

IANAL but I'm just guessing no court would take this seriously.

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bb123
The licence prohibits Law Enforcement use. What does that have to do with
Capitalism? I'm fairly sure every socialist/communist/facist country has some
form of law enforcement.

~~~
colesantiago
Laws and borders are just a social construct, we don't really need them.

Even if we do, the community can govern themselves.

~~~
ryanbrunner
When the community elects to police itself, if someone volunteers to watch a
neighbourhood for a night are they considered law enforcement? If not, why? I
recognize there's a difference but this license makes no effort to distinguish
between those two things.

And if your starting point for why a term of a license is "we don't need
laws", what exactly is the point of having a license anyway?

~~~
guerrilla
> When the community elects to police itself, if someone volunteers to watch a
> neighbourhood for a night are they considered law enforcement? If not, why?

The difference would be that they would be chosen from the community by the
community, not external to it and chosen by external actors.

> "we don't need laws"

This confounds laws with law enforcement. The concepts you're missing are
consent and cooperation.

~~~
nailer
> The difference would be that they would be chosen from the community by the
> community, not external to it and chosen by external actors.

So law enforcement chosen by the community is not law enforcement?

~~~
guerrilla
It is not what people call law enforcement today, correct.

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kome
Also give the authors background, that's more an artistic take - than a real,
well thought, license.

For a "real", pro-freedom AND anti-capitalist software license, please
consider GPL 3.

And for a "real", pro-freedom AND capitalism-agnostic software license,
consider MIT.

~~~
gspr
> For a "real", pro-freedom AND anti-capitalist software license, please
> consider GPL 3.

I wouldn't say that GPL3 is "anti-capitalist". Rather, it's extremely pro-
freedom and forces certain behavior on part of the capitalists that they
aren't inclined to partake in on their own volition.

~~~
kome
true

IMHO among the various OS licenses, GPL it's the more inclined toward anti-
capitalism. But that's a personal reading.

~~~
zzz61831
Maybe GPL started as an anti-capitalist license, but in practice it became
very much pro-capitalist. It got to the point that GPLv3 and AGPLv3 were split
into two licenses to satisfy capitalists.

Among various _properly written and practical_ open source licenses Parity
license is probably the most anti-capitalist one.

