[mijoharas]

I've skimmed the post, and I've clicked through to the license[0], but I'm not clear on what is meant by "firewall license"?

Is it just that the license doesn't allow use by corporations, and that's why they say the target audience is:

> Those who reject genocide-friendly software licensing

Can someone help me grok it a little better?

[0] https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi-license

[3np]

Basically the license permits you to use the source code for education, compiling builds for individual personal use (no sharing!), and proposing changes to upstream via a fork on github.com. That's it. The part about corporations is just to contrast it to their upstream license to explain that this license does not differentiate between commercial and non-commercial use.

It takes some assumptions to make sense of the "firewall" part. I'm strawsteelmanning here:

- There are Bad People

- If Bad People successfully use my software, it will lead to Bad Things

- The Good Things caused by permissive licenses are more than offset by (or can't compensate for) by the harm done by BP

- My software enables the harm and it wouldn't happen to the same extent without it

- The only way to mitigate this is to retain authority to decide exactly who gets to do what with the source

- Under an Open Source license I am unable to refuse Bad People from using or resharing my software

It follows that any software with enough adoption available under a free license will lead to Bad Things. Therefore the only ethical license is one where the author retains this absolute discretion/power to tell BP "no". This discretion is the "firewall". The inability of the author to arbitrarily forbid users from adopting the software is the "lost right to refusal of the individual" mentioned.

When taken just a bit further it's not too dissimilar to resigning to the reality that we must outlaw strong cryptography and restrict access to general computing and "powerful AI" to only identifiable and accountable non-BP because criminals and terrorists means we can't have nice things and slavery is freedom.

Don't let the fancy quotes and rhetoric give you the illusion that there're any deep insights behind this. Tankies gotta tank.

I do not find it compelling and will continue to promote free software.

[skybrian]

I also found that confusing. My guess as to what they mean is that if someone makes changes, they are not obligated to share them with the world?

That is, they are against free and indiscriminate sharing, which would allow bad people to use their software.

They link directly to this Q&A in the OSI FAQ:

> Can I stop “evil people” from using my program?

> No. The Open Source Definition specifies that Open Source licenses may not discriminate against persons or groups. Giving everyone freedom means giving evil people freedom, too.

[3np]

You can very much restrict software from being used in certain ways and for certain purposes and still be Open Source. Focus more on the "how" than the "who".

Making the claim that OSI necessitates "genocide-friendly licenses" is not a constructive direction.

OP could conceivably have come up with an alternative license preserving the freedoms without allowing the uses they disagree with. They chose the easier path, which is by itself fine. Painting the entire FLOSS community as genocide enablers and claiming there is no middle ground as long as the author is not in complete control of all redistribution and derivatives ("right to refuse") is unnecessary.

[skybrian]

Not that this is a good idea, but how do you suppose a window manager could be modified so that it's not useful for "bad" purposes?

It seems difficult to do for general-purpose software.

[3np]

I'm saying you could forbid it in the license. Like some licenses might allow personal but not non-commercial use, you could come up with other disallowed uses. Seems like a better idea than attempting to limits its use to your in-group.