Bloat is a very wide term that in the context of software and technology means extreme growth of software in terms of source code size, complexity, dependencies, useless features and resource usage, all of which lead to inefficiency, bad-design, bugginess, security vulnerabilities, loss of freedom, obscurity and ugliness. Bloat is bad. Creating bloat is a very, very bad engineering. Unfortunately bloat is absolutely taking over all technology nowadays.
Bloat is a very wide term that in the context of software and technology means extreme growth in terms of source code size, complexity, number of dependencies, useless features and resource usage, all of which lead to inefficient, badly designed technology with bugs and security vulnerabilities, as well as loss of freedom, waste of human effort and great obscurity and ugliness. Bloat is extremely bad and one of the greatest technological issues of today. Creating bloat is bad engineering at it worst and unfortunately it is what's absolutely taking over all technology nowadays, mostly due to [capitalism](capitalism.md), commercialization, consumerism and incompetent people trying to take on jobs they are in no way qualification to do.
[Based software](based_software.md), [suckless](suckless.md) and others are trying to address this issue and write software that is good, minimal, safe, efficient and well functioning.
[LRS](lrs.md), [suckless](suckless.md) and some others small groups are trying to address the issue and write software that is good, minimal, safe, efficient and well functioning. Nevertheless our numbers are very small and in this endeavor we are basically standing against the whole world and the most powerful tech corporations.
*Capitalism is [cancer](cancer.md) of society. ~drummyfish*
Capitalism is the worst economic system we've yet seen in the history. Literally based on pure greed, abandoning all morals and putting profit above everything else including preservation of life itself, capitalism fuels the worst in people and forces them to compete and suffer for basic needs. Capitalism is anti-progress, anti-technology, anti-freedom, supports immense waste of resources, wars, abuse of people, destruction of environment, invention of bullshit jobs and much more.
Capitalism is the worst economic system we've yet seen in the history.^[source](logic.md) Literally based on pure greed, abandoning all morals and putting profit above everything else including preservation of life itself, capitalism fuels the worst in people and forces them to compete and suffer for basic needs. Capitalism is anti-progress, anti-technology, anti-freedom, supports immense waste of resources, wars, abuse of people, destruction of environment, invention of bullshit jobs and much more.
Capitalism produces the [worst imaginable technology](capitalist_software.md).
Capitalism produces the [worst imaginable technology](capitalist_software.md).
@ -12,8 +12,7 @@ In the [FOSS](foss.md) world there is a huge battle between the copyleft camp an
In the great debate of copyleft vs permissive free-licenses we, as technological anarchists, stand on the permissive side. Here are some reasons for why we reject copyleft:
- **Copyleft can force harmful conditions as long as they don't violate software freedom.** For example just as there may be an obligation of crediting the author, there may as well be an obligation to keep included some text that promotes some unethical political ideology and so **everyone who wants to execute the basic freedoms has to promote this politics with which he may not necessarily agree**.
- By adopting copyleft one is **embracing and supporting the copyright laws** ("marrying the lawyers") because copyleft relies on and uses copyright laws. Copyleft chooses to play along with the capitalist bullshit [intellectual property](intellectual_property.md) game and threatens to use force and bullying in order to enforce *correct* usage of information.
- In a way it is **[bloat](bloat.md)**. Copyleft introduces **legal complexity**, [friction](friction.md) and takes programmers' [head space](head_space.md), especially when copyleft is probably mostly ineffective as **detecting its violation and actual legal enforcement is difficult, expensive and without a guaranteed positive outcome** ([FSF](fsf.md) encourages programmers to hand over their copyright to them so they can defend their programs which just confirms existence and relevance of this issue). Sure, corporations can probably "abuse" permissive (non-copyleft) software easier, but we argue that this is a problem whose roots lie in the broken basic principles of our society ([capitalism](capitalism.md)) and so the issue should be addressed by improving our socioeconomic system rather than by bullshit legal techniques that just imperfectly cure the symptoms.
- **The scope of copyleft is highly debatable** (which is why we have different kind of copyleft such as *strong*, *weak*, *network* etc.). I.e. it can't be objectively said what exactly should classify as violation of copyleft AND increasing copyleft scope leads to copylefted software being practically unusable. Consider this **example**: [Linux](linux.md) is copylefted which means we can't create a proprietary version of Linux, nevertheless we can create a proprietary operating system of which Linux is part (e.g. [Android](android.md) in which its proprietary app store makes it de-facto owned by [Google](google.md)), and so Linux is effectively used as a part of proprietary software -- the copyleft is bypassed. One might try to increase the copyleft scope here by saying *"everything Linux ever touches has to be free software"* which would however render Linux unusable on practically any computer as most computers contain at least some small proprietary software and hardware. The restriction would be too great.
- In practice, **copyleft licenses have to be complex and ugly** because they have to strictly describe the copyleft scope and include lots of legal [boilerplate](boilerplate.md) in order to make them well defendable in court -- and as we know, complexity comes with bugs, vulnerabilities and other burden. Indeed, we see this in practice: the only practically used copyleft licenses are the various versions of GPL of which all are ugly and have historically shown many faults (which is again evident from e.g. looking at GPL v1 vs v2 vs v3). Permissive licenses on the other hand are simple, clear and well understandable.
- In practice, **copyleft licenses have to be complex and ugly** because they have to strictly describe the copyleft scope and include lots of legal [boilerplate](boilerplate.md) in order to make them well defendable in court -- and as we know, complexity comes with bugs, vulnerabilities and other burden. Indeed, we see this in practice: the only practically used copyleft licenses are the various versions of GPL of which all are ugly and have historically shown many faults (which is again evident from e.g. looking at GPL v1 vs v2 vs v3). Permissive licenses on the other hand are simple, clear and well understandable.
Miloslav Ciz
3 years ago