| 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. |