[Libre-soc-dev] [libre-soc-dev] Alex Oliva's intro, and RFC on mission

[whygee at f-cpu.org]

Hello Alexandre :-)

On 2020-11-21 04:50, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> That's not to say I have the tools to avoid that.  I draw inspiration
> from strong copyleft, that enables intermediaries to put in whatever
> evil features they wish, but that ensures downstream users have the
> freedom to rip them off.  I don't know how to encode such protections 
> in
> hardware, where copyright licensing doesn't apply and the ability to
> make changes, even having the sources, is far more limited, but I'd 
> like
> to know that, should we come across legal or technological tools that
> would enable us to ensure users ultimately get the freedoms we wish to
> build into the hardware, we won't have that discussion then and decide
> we want to privilege our direct customers over downstream users.

To me, the terms "user" and "customer" are equivalent.

If you buy something, you want to use it, right ? :-)

Now if we consider "unethical actors" :
  * they would turn to proprietary solutions by default
  * if they want to exploit the "free work" of others,
      so can others and the reputation (from the community,
      and/or the problems cause by the added roadblocks)
      will make users select the implementations that let
      people do what they want, not submit to a particular actor.

This is an old, oooold debate we already had with the F-CPU project
and there is only one solution : "just do it", accept that there will
always be selfish interests and show the world how things could
be made better. It's long overdue !

yg