The hypothetical seems silly to me.

If China manages to do both of those things it would be due to a huge amount of focussed and iterative innovation within a closed loop in China that will already have been well under way for many years.

If we suspend disbelief and ponder that that might be on the verge of being announced then availability of FOSS would only have been a small part of that many years-long process.

The other two parts being:

- a stable, focussed and well-funded ecosystem of primary research which has been a key strength of China for years but which of late has been sorely disrupted by China’s increasingly autocratic internal policies under the excuse of Covid

-strong international flow of the materials and skills required to manufacture and deploy the foundational technology at scale which sanctions have been effective in targeting.

Trying to limit the spread of FOSS would almost certainly create an environment in which the incentives to contribute fall away entirely (would you work for free on a software project if you might be subject to a Mcarthyite witch hunt for your troubles?).

The big winners would be Microsoft, Oracle etc. the big loser would be the speed of innovation in the western world which in all probability would chip away at a key benefit of western world (relative) openness over the Chinese system and gradually achieve the opposite of the planned outcome.

No, open-source should be neutral and stay well away from politics.

Definitely.

Open source isn't a political tool, and besides, you can't do anything to prevent "them" from using it, since Open Source is, well, you'd never guess, "open"... What would you do? Create a license which states that anybody can fork it -- except those we chose at some point to call the "Bad Guys"? And, "them" being bad to the bone, will they refrain from using it nevertheless? Utter nonsense. This is political willy-waving spilling onto serious things, somebody please get a mop before it leaves any stains.

I think their ultimate goal is to change the license of open-source software to enforce political agendas. So that if you violate the Contributor Covenant [1]speech code , you lose the license to use the software. Yes, that is what these activists want to do, it is nothing to do with ethics, it is all about power and control. And I know in particular this is absolutely the case with [2]Coraline Ada Ehmke at least, someone who is trying to dismantle the [3]meritocratic culture in open source and likely replace it with something political instead.

The same kind of politics you get in a corporate environment has now come to open source software. So it's open source's equivalent of the HR department.

[1] https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/what-are-speech-codes

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coraline_Ada_Ehmke

[3] https://postmeritocracy.org

> you lose the license

And that will scare the bad guys away?

I feel much safer since I've put up a notice on my door stating that it is forbidden to break in...

I have memories of certain encryption methods on the banned from export listed as "munitions" from the USA. They were, of course, easy to get a hold of and s/w which had optional dependencies on it simply asked you if you were allowed to use it and, naturally, happily compiled and ran with the "banned" encryption included, no matter where in the world you lived.

You could also get the source code legally printed on a t shirt for some algorithms... Protected under freedom of speech.

Some more information about [1]Coraline Ada Ehmke :

[2]https://speakerdeck.com/bantik Coraline Ada Ehmke (bantik) on Speaker Deck.

[3]https://archive.ph/NsPmk IdolHands.com - The Rev. Dr.Corey Bantik (his web site)

[4]https://anexamenofwitches.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/the-negative-confessions/ The Negative Confessions

This is the person imposing the "Contributor Covenant" and "Post Meritocracy Manifesto" on open source software. Former name before transitioning to female is Corey Dale Ehmke, he was also known on Usenet alt.magick as "bantik" in the 1990s. She is or was into all this occult stuff, that's why she calls herself a "code witch", by the way.

It is somewhat overwhelming to comprehend that *this* *person* is writing the [5]rules on what we are allowed to say to each other , when developing open source software.

Further proof that she owned the "IdolHands.com" domain is from one of her GitHub repositories, which I have archived below:

[6]https://github.com/CoralineAda/ambient_spec/blob/master/ambient_spec.gemspec

[7]https://archive.is/II9Pv

Where you can clearly see she has the email address "coraline@idolhands.com".

And the people behind IdolHands.com - including Corey Ehmke:

[8]https://web.archive.org/web/19990218170541/http://idolhands.com/personal.html

And finally his/her occult writings, to browse:

[9]https://web.archive.org/web/20200918080333/http://egypt.idolhands.com/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coraline_Ada_Ehmke

[2] https://speakerdeck.com/bantik

[3] https://archive.ph/NsPmk

[4] https://anexamenofwitches.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/the-negative-confessions/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_Covenant

[6] https://github.com/CoralineAda/ambient_spec/blob/master/ambient_spec.gemspec

[7] https://archive.is/II9Pv

[8] https://web.archive.org/web/19990218170541/http://idolhands.com/personal.html

[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20200918080333/http://egypt.idolhands.com/

Also more proof she has the alias "Bantik":

[1]https://coderwall.com/Bantik from 2011

[2]https://about.me/bantik

[3]https://github.com/taigaio/code-of-conduct

[4]https://rubygems.org/gems/well_actually/versions/1.0.0

[5]https://www.ashedryden.com/cocpledge-select-tweets (search for @bantik) - from 2014.

And finally, an everything2.com account: [6]https://everything2.com/user/Bantik

Note I've archived all the above links at archive.is.

[1] https://coderwall.com/Bantik

[2] https://about.me/bantik

[3] https://github.com/taigaio/code-of-conduct

[4] https://rubygems.org/gems/well_actually/versions/1.0.0

[5] https://www.ashedryden.com/cocpledge-select-tweets

[6] https://everything2.com/user/Bantik

This is not new, there are "not for military use" and "not for evil" licences and they've been around for quite a while. Whether they're effective at all is another discussion.

Coraline Ada Ehmke has already done enough damage to the open-source community by imposing speech codes on participants, such as her Contributor Covenant. And we don't want her gaining even more power by taking advantage of recent events.

[1]https://archive.is/EBcZO

People like her within the community, who try to control the [2]language that we use , are why I am no longer interested in contributing to open source software.

The corporate bullshit has come to open source.

[1] https://archive.is/EBcZO

[2] https://inclusivenaming.org/word-lists/

Codes of conduct on Open Source projects were around well before 2018...

I've been using OS since the 80's...

I smell a radical pushing a specific political agenda...

The widespread adoption of code of conducts in open source started around ~2014 or so. Prior to that pretty much only GNOME had one. And it wasn't politicized against "harassment" like the Contributor Covenant is. And there were no inclusive terminology guidelines and other such nonsense. In fact, the two organizations most responsible for this was the Ada Initiative and Geek Feminism.

> I smell a radical pushing a specific political agenda...

Somewhat correct, I am promoting freedom of speech and strongly oppose censorship and authoritarianism in all its forms. I was horrified to see hardline feminists pushing their politics into open source software, so I am doing my best as an individual to oppose it. And one of those ways is by making people aware of what's going on.

Sometimes. This is the same issue for scienctific papers and patents. There is a huge internal rate of progress benefit to keeping these things open, offset by a significant but not quite as huge external negative of letting tyranical regimes around the world benefit from that same progress. However the author is correct there remains an absurd level of naievity in both open source and academia that will need to change. Like it or not, we are back in a cold war with some very unpleasant regimes. There is a significant subset of papers and open source that should remain unpublished as trade secrets and a level of control should and will be placed on universities and repositories to ensure review processes exist so the worst and most obvious cases do not find their way through.

I absolutely disagree, code is speech and we cannot place restrictions on contributors' ability to speak freely.

And free speech is indeed a very nice right to have young man. Enjoy exercising that right under emperor Xi. Or we could just apply a little common sense today. Nobody's proposing stopping you writing the code or doing the research, just maybe occasionally dont shoot your mouth off to the enemy just because you 'have the right'.

There should be room for common sense too, not only licences and laws. If releasing a piece of software to the bad guys would make the situation worse for someone, then that could be weighed against the benefit to the good guys before a decision is taken about releasing source code.

A unified policy in such matters would not IMHO cover all cases well.

But I'm sure this happens already.

"If releasing a piece of software to the bad guys would make the situation worse for someone, then that could be weighed against the benefit to the good guys before a decision is taken about releasing source code."

Not enough "experts in the field" to do that, so it will be politicians and civil servants wielding the rubber stamps, so most likely it will inconvenience honest and "good" people while the "bad" people will still obtain what they need one way or another.

There's a difference between supplying the software to the bad guys directly and generally publishing the software. I guess if you are directly and intentionally supplying the enemy, then that could be made illegal, under "conspiracy" laws. But if you publish it in general for everyone worldwide, I would be very concerned about the implications for freedom of speech. And I personally believe code is speech. Therefore general publication should be completely legal.

There is no discussion possible. The definition of terms for the license to be a [1]valid open source license are:

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

and

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

Therefore, any restrictions in the distribution based on political winds makes the project no longer F(L)OSS.

[1] https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

There is no discussion possible. The definition of terms for the license to be a valid open source license are:

Potentially incompatible with national and international law. If a country, like the US, or a trading bloc like the EU decides it's illegal to provide a good or service to another nation, or individual, they have the power to pass legislation and punish violators. Which is kind of back to the days of my old T-shirt with export controlled crypto printed on it. Non-state sanctioned crypto used to be illegal in France. But look how that played out. The genie's well and trully out of the bottle when source code is so easily distributed by so many mechanisms.

In the speech, she opined: "Open source software today is playing a critical role in mass surveillance, anti-immigrant violence, protester suppression, racially biased policing and the development and use of cruel and inhumane weapons."

She's right. Google, Twitter, Apple, Facebook, Palantir etc etc all use, or used OSS to perform those critical roles on a massive scale. The whole Internet pretty much relies on it, and attempting to have one authoritarian regime ban or block another is pretty pointless, especially when heavily sanctioned nations have always found workarounds. Or just develops their own alternatives. That's kind of the problem with attempting to punish a country like China. It has a rather large population that traditionally values society and education more than we do. They've invested massively in STEM education and research, we haven't. Basic population distribution suggests that if you've got 1bn people, they're going to produce more intelligent people than a country with a population of <100m. Especially when in some of those countries, intelligence is racist and a symbol of opression.

I think the bigger problem with society is we've both enabled mass surveillance, protestor suppression and restrictions on free speech, and many seem quite content with this. Until perhaps they're on the receiving end of those tools of oppression, but by then it's too late.

Wheels and hammers are too! And electricity! And other things!

Solution : ban all the things!

One thing at a time. But the world's gone slightly mad-

https://time.com/6242949/exercise-industry-white-supremacy/

The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness

Errm.. right. I never trusted runners, but I also get the feeling the Time article may have been taken slightly out of context. I guess there is some truth in it given the dark times around the 1900's where eugenics was considered a good thing. But I think most people would generally consider exercise to be postive for health. Unless you take it to extremes, but that's extremists for you.

But perhaps it's time for some self-reflection. Time's rebranded it's 'Man of the Yea' to 'Person of the Year', and awarded it to a whole country. Yet time is one of the biggest symbols of oppression and colonialism. Once upon a time, we used to be able to do things in our own time, until a colonial system was imposed on us. Then to further oppress us, alarm clocks were invented so servants could be woken up so their master's breakfasts were ready, and their newspapers and magazines were freshly ironed. It's also fundamentally racist, as recent evens have shown. Why should Australians get to celebrate a happy new year, before the UK does? Everyone should be free to celebrate a new year in their own time.

Alarm clocks were invented so you wouldn't need to employ a knocker-upper. And knocker-uppers are due to shift work in factories and offices, not household servants.

Whether bells are worse than being knocked up is an open question.

Most FOSS is written in English, so just ban the Bad Guys (tm) from speaking English, simplez!

But more seriously, you have two approaches to restricting FOSS: one is to deny its use via a license, but who will enforce that in those countries? The second is to deny access by having a "Great firewall of the West" but we know how hard that is to make work against anyone smart enough to code, and the simple option of blocking whole countries at the BGP would allow authoritarian regimes to further control their people's minds by blocking a view of the rest of the world. Neither would do much good.

Really the main sanction that can usefully be employed against them is to block the supply of hardware needed to make any of that work, and to deny direct support (as most companies did by withdrawing from Russia after Putin's invasion of Ukraine).

ALL FOSS is written with digits and / or alphabets and / or punctuation marks.

Let's ban bad guys from using them!

I get the feeling the questions being asked by governments are not truly honest. Open source is a threat to propriety software. If you can lock down open source you make it harder to develop leaving private companies free to take all of that space. You also stifle innovation. Using the military and surveillance uses to me feels just like the "won't someone think of the children" argument when it comes to privacy and encryption. Capitalism does not like free when someone could be making a profit from it or a profit from it not being available. Look at how much food we throw away for proof of that. Also who decides who can have access and to what?

Open source is what it is, open and it should stay like that.

Most if not all proprietary software uses open source.

At my last place we use to buy in an imaging library for windows. They claim to be the best in the world.

We created our own for non-windows. By the time I left we had the capability to use the non-windows one on windows. Politics at board level stopped us plus I gave up arguing. Would have saved a fortune as we always got screwed over financially when we upgraded the imaging library and the upgrade never went smoothly (too many regressions in the library).

When I dug deep into the proprietary library I found it was using all the same libraries we were using but statically linked into thier DLL's with name mangling of some sort (binary sequence searches for known unique strings). Thier commercial licence made no mention of the OS libraries they were using.

Availability of communications is one way for the dissidents to coordinate their opposition to the state. Modems were indispensable in coordination of the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Locking down access is probably counter to desirable outcomes.

Now where FOSS is being used in something sinister, one would argue that cutting it now is after the horse has already bolted. After all, if you are in that environment you've already downloaded the source code you want to use. Probably.