Judges have minimal training in the procedures of the court. Some are attorneys which gives them more familiarity with law and process, but as far as I know that’s not a requirement.
The jury selection process has nothing to do with qualifications of jurors. The prosecutors are primarily trying to eliminate people they think will be sympathetic and the defense is primarily looking to eliminate people they think might biased against their client.
The lack of legal training is exactly the issue at hand.
Juror selection isn’t about qualifications. However, it does give both sides an opportunity to eliminate vested or deeply unqualified interests that may be biased against them. With a judge you have no such option.
Except for appeal. If a judge gets overturned enough on appeal, they can rightly be said to be unreliable. Which means, if they're elected to the position, their opponent can site how many times they got overturned as a legitimate reason to think they're bad at their job.
All of this functions well... unless the electorate is uneducated or misled, and apathetic. That's the real problem in this case. People are winning popularity contests, because the only thing middle and high school taught most of the electorate was that you should be popular.
It isn't true everywhere. Reputation and reputation systems can and do function well. But they require a functional press, and an interested public.
I remember this very well. I was living close enough to the commotion to hear whatever it was that was getting set off (smoke bombs?) in an attempt to disrupt the protests at night. I recall pulling off the highway only to see an army Jeep and a soldier with an assault rifle waving me back toward an on-ramp.
Haven’t experienced anything nearly as dramatic since.
To be reunited with the woman I married who had a mental health crisis and divorced me in the throes of it. She could have ended up dead or homeless but somehow managed to stay safe enough that when police intervened and called her family she was able to get the help and diagnosis she needed.
We’ve been back together for nearly two years now but it’s really sinking in now how close we all came to losing her permanently to death or ending up another nameless face on the streets.
The great thing about CoC is that they tend to be self-reinforcing, keeping out exactly the people who are bound to conduct themselves in ways that are inconsistent with the principles behind them.
I participated and co-ran a gaming community for about 10 years, and whenever drama occurred we added whatever behavior triggered it to the rule list. It grew, and grew and grew into a very large CoC. By a few year into it people caused drama over the rules, people "lawyer" over them, they got enforced selectively, people accused each other of favor-ism, splits occurred and the community almost killed itself over the rules.
When the game moved into a sequel we changed the rules. Now it says "Treat others with respect and courtesy", which don't really qualify as a CoC since its basically common sense. People see it as so obvious that it not even a rule, more of a guideline.
This new rule has since then been pretty stable. It keeps out exactly those who can't behave but welcomes everyone else. There has not been a single instance of arguments about selective enforcement or favor-ism in terms to how the rules get enforced.
My own experience from that seems very similar when people complain about CoC. Long CoC lists tend to create fear, uncertainty and doubt within the community. It creates tiers of people where different class of people get the rules enforced differently. This in turn create a deep seated distrust.
Before codes of conduct, it was reasonably common for misogynistic men to get away with poor behaviour towards women in their communities “because they write good code”. I’ve suffered this directly, so have others I’m close to.
> Before codes of conduct, it was reasonably common for misogynistic men to get away with poor behaviour towards women in their communities “because they write good code”.
And now they're just as misogynistic, but we don't get to enjoy their code. They're also hidden from view so it's less likely that someone is going to tell them to cut the crap and maybe re-evaluate their world-view. They've essentially been shoved into an echo chamber.
In the end, arguing about code of conduct means arguing about the core ideas of free speech, one of them being: Do we want to segregate wrongdoers, or attempt to deal with them?
> And now they're just as misogynistic, but we don't get to enjoy their code.
I'd rather get the code of all the women who were driven out of tech by their bigotry and hate than whatever they'd write, even if it was legendary golden code spewed forth from the fount of all wisdom.
I honestly am not amazingly fussed about what we do with them overall as long as I don’t personally have to deal with them when trying to publish some code!
Linus' use of explicit language was exactly something that should be used as an example. He rarely attacked people, but instead attacked the actions that they did or ideas that they had.
I'm not sure what point you're making here? In hindsight, he views his words as inappropriate. I'm not sure I understand what the temporal distance between the words and the apology has to do with how appropriate they were.
He's the Gordon Ramsay of the software world. Sometimes it just takes strong language to get a point across: "your code is low quality and you're wasting my time by having me review it". And to be honest, I'd gladly take being insulted over having to waste my time. Strong language doesn't hurt anyone, but you won't ever get that wasted time back. I consider it verbal self-defense.
> Saying proprietary licenses are deadly without explanation seems more like zealotry than reasoned consideration.
Look I didn't come up with the analogy for the virality of the GPL. I don't think it's very illuminating. What the analogy says is that once you have GPL-licenced code in your code all of it will catch it and must be published under the GPL. Proprietary code is worse because once you have proprietary code in your code it becomes unpublishable. I call that fatal under the analogy.
> Thankfully we have alternatives to the GPL like MIT and Apache for people who want to share source but not force that choice on others.
Sure those are benign within the analogy. That's what the analogy is meant to convey. Funny thing though: MIT code can be made proprietary, I mean fatal, GPL code cannot.
That was an epic troll. In a single post it took the OP from implied acceptance of an anti-GPL trope to explicitly defending proprietary licenses from an attack by the same kind of careless metaphor.
I hope others on HN pick up on this and use the "proprietary is deadly" trope similarly (that is, only in response to casual uses of the "viral GPL" trope).
This is why I almost always downvote comments that talks describe a license as viral. It is a metaphor that only causes harm to civil and constructive discussions.
See also Viral Code and Vaccination by Robert J. Chassell:
—
When others hurt me, I try to defend myself. But some tell me that this makes them sick. They tell me that I should permit people to rob me of my work. They tell me that I should never try to defend myself.
They tell me that I should stop using the GNU General Public License, a license that vaccinates me against hurt. Instead, I should adopt a license that permits other people to rob me with impunity. They want me to adopt a license that forbids me from fighting back. They want me to give up my right to benefit from a derivative of my own work, a right I possess under current copyright law.
Of course, the language is a little less feverish than this. Usually, I myself am not called “infectious”. Rather, the legal defense that I use is called “infectious”. The license I choose is called “viral”.
In every day language, words such as “infect” and “virus” describe disease. The rhetoric is metaphorical. A legal tool is not a disease organism; but it is popular to think of the law as an illness, so the metaphor has impact.
The people who want to rob me use language that says I make them sick when I stop them from robbing me. They do not want to draw attention to the so-called “disease” that makes them ill: my health and my rights, and the health and rights of other people. Instead, they choose metaphor to twist people's thinking. They do not want anyone to think that I am a good citizen for stopping crime. They want the metaphor to fool others into thinking that I am a disease agent.
The GNU General Public License protects me. The connotation of “virus” and “infect” is that my choice of defense gives an illness to those who want to rob me. I want freedom from their robbery; but they want the power to hurt me. They get sick when they cannot hurt me.
To use another health and illness-related metaphor, the GNU General Public License vaccinates me; it protects me from theft.
Note that the theft about which I am talking is entirely legal in some situations: if you license your work under a modified BSD license, or a similar license, then others may legally take your work, make fixes or improvements to it, and forbid you from using that code. I personally dislike this arrangement, but it exists.
GPL has had decades of reasoned consideration, and v3 in particular is one of that few holdouts in an era of tivoization that puts the user in a prison. It is inevitably the users who suffer, and in greater numbers. Tivoization is fatal in the sense of freedom of the user, which is the most important freedom in many peoples eyes.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. BSD is about freedom for the devs. GPL is about freedom for the user. Not all users are devs, but all devs are users, and users should take precedence. Proprietary doesn't give a crap about either, and its defenders are the ones most closely resembling religious zealotry... as in false in almost every way but clung to mostly because it benefits it's pushers.
The usual retort to this argument is to analogize devs to mechanics: most car owners don't want to tinker with their engines, but even car owners appreciate the freedom to choose their own mechanic, and assume the mechanic has the ability to utilize and access to alternative parts.
Why stop at phones, what about x86 too? When does it stop? I side with freedom, and say phones should be more free, instead of making excuses about why they aren't. This is why I fully support pinephone and Librem 5's work, however imperfect. The right to repair, in my opinion, inherently requires the right to root. Firmware in particular is behind, (which is why I have some holdout hope for power and risc/mips architectures in the future), but we can still fight for software freedom at least.
The GPL has no power that owners of proprietary code don't already have. The GPL is a software license under copyright law which grants certain permissions subject to certain conditions. If you don't fulfill those conditions, standard copyright law takes effect.
The GPL does not on its own have the power to "infect" the rest of your codebase. You can absolutely decide you want to distribute GPL'd software compiled in with proprietary software for which you don't want to release the source. The owner of the GPL software still does not, at this point, have any right to your source. All they can do is say, since you have not obeyed the conditions, you don't have a valid license for my software, and I am now ready to sue you for infringement.
You can resolve this situation by relicensing the proprietary components under the GPL and distributing source, if you'd like. GPLv3 has an explicit provision that says, if you do this within 30 days of being notified of the problem, the license retroactively does apply to you and it wasn't infringement. Many major GPLv2 rightsholders have voluntarily adopted the same condition for their GPLv2 code: https://gplcc.github.io/gplcc/
You can also resolve the situation by settling with them out of court, going to court and paying damages, going to court and arguing it was fair use / de minimis / whatever, trying to buy them out, etc. If you're willing to do any of those, then you don't have to release your source. (If you go to court and lose, you will probably be ordered to not further distribute the GPL'd code in violation of the license.)
None of this is specific to the GPL. If you use proprietary code without a license at all, the rightsholders can still sue you. You can still negotiate with them. You can still fight it out in court. The rightsholder can even choose to say, "Hey, you know what? If you release the entire source code to your product publicly, we'll drop this case." They have the ability to negotiate that with you because that's the same ability GPL rightsholders have.
GPL is considered "viral" because, for most people, releasing the rest of your source code is preferable to losing in court for regular copyright infringement. With proprietary software, if it's found out that you've misused someone's code, they probably will not offer you that viral option - they'll go straight for the monetary damages. If you don't consider that fatal, then you shouldn't fear that situation with the GPL, either.
> The GPL has no power that owners of proprietary code don't already have.
This is technically true, but practically getting a proprietary license for some GPLed programs would be obscenely difficult. How many authors are there of GNU Bash? GCC? Would all of those authors accept money from Apple to allow them to ship a proprietary version of their code in MacOS? Are they all even still alive? And I bet some people would demand obscene amounts of money for tiny patches they made decades ago, just to spite Apple. And they'd probably write scathing blog posts about how apple hates free software just because they were asked. Then what would apple do? Strip out random chunks of code from archaic codebases like bash and hope for the best? Ugh.
This would be fine if there was a central owner to whom copyright has been assigned, but opensource programmers aren't in the habit of doing that. So there's no central body with whom Apple can negotiate (and even if there was, would the FSF sell a proprietary license to apple?). Under RMS? No way.
Your second point seems incoherent in its own terms. You say:
> You can absolutely decide you want to distribute GPL'd software compiled in with proprietary software for which you don't want to release the source.
... But then you say:
> GPL is considered "viral" because, for most people, releasing the rest of your source code is preferable to losing in court for regular copyright infringement.
So you're saying that the GPL only applies if you don't want to get sued? I mean, sure, but spoilers: Apple doesn't want to get sued for GPL violations. They have deep pockets, and they'd lose, and they'd get really bad press for it which might hurt their ability to hire good programmers in the long run. They don't want the reputation Microsoft had in the 90s.
My point is that proprietary code being proprietary also only matters if you don't want to get sued.
There is a view that the GPL is more dangerous than proprietary code. This is untrue: it is strictly less dangerous. If you are somehow not worried about being sued over proprietary code (which, to be clear, seems like a bad approach to me), you shouldn't be more worried about the GPL.
You also have no guarantee of negotiating a license from the owner of proprietary code, and such owner is way more likely to have lawyers than someone who posted a patch to bash 10 years ago and them disappeared from the internet.
(Also, for GNU projects, GNU has a policy of requiring copyright assignment to the FSF, mostly because the FSF does have lawyers and are unlikely to be willing to negotiate a private license. For non-GNU software, agreed, but, "This vendor went out of business and we have no idea where the copyright ended up" isn't unheard of either.)
> The GPL does not on its own have the power to "infect" the rest of your codebase.
The reason some people specifically want to avoid enhancing GPLed software is because they want to be able to modify software without the condition of releasing the source for their modifications. The fact that the alternative to voluntarily releasing the source is being sued doesn't make the situation any less burdensome.
> With proprietary software, if it's found out that you've misused someone's code, they probably will not offer you that viral option - they'll go straight for the monetary damages.
And this rarely happens in practice because people with proprietary software guard the source and don't intentionally let others have it.
All three options (proprietary, GPLed, permissive open-source licenses) serve different purposes and will be chosen by different entities based on individual circumstances.
None is a one-size-fits-all, and I think we've seen over the last decade or more that the size that fits many corporations is the permissive open-source license model which allows them to contribute back what they'd like without being forced into the choice between contributing back everything or being sued.
The GPL is considered viral because linking GPL code into my application imposes legal requirements and restrictions on all the other code in my application. Most licenses don't do this. If I bought a proprietary software license that said "you must not use this code in a program that implements DRM", I would call that viral as well.
Most free software licenses? Sure. Most Proprietary software licenses? I don't know about that. For example from IE 5:
> 6. EXPORT RESTRICTIONS. You agree that you will not export or re-export the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, any part thereof, or any process or service that is the direct product of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT (the foregoing collectively referred to as the "Restricted Components"), to any country, person or entity subject to U.S. export restrictions. You specifically agree not to export or re-export any of the Restricted Components (i) to any country to which the U.S. has embargoed or restricted the export of goods or services, which currently include, but are not necessarily limited to Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, or to any national of any such country, wherever located, who intends to transmit or transport the products back to such country; (ii) to any entity who you know or have reason to know will utilize the Restricted Components in the design, development or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; or (iii) to any entity who you know or have reason to know has been prohibited from participating in U.S. export transactions by any federal agency of the U.S. government. You warrant and represent that neither the BXA nor any other U.S. federal agency has suspended, revoked or denied your export privileges.
I have seen similar clauses in a lot of other software in the past (such as itunes, Adobe programs, and Norton I think).
How would we describe a license that simplie said that you are not allowed to impose any restrictions, legal or otherwise, when distributing the software or work made from it.
True, but it’s perfectly reasonable for Apple to come to the conclusion that, “we just don’t want to deal with the risk” and move on. If they’re not using either GPLed or proprietary stuff, the problem goes away.
> Google created a culture and set of values and recruited based on that.
Company culture changes. Companies change. The fact that you were told one thing or a company had a particular reputation when you joined doesn’t mean that thing will always hold true.
Union busting and discrimination are illegal. Terminating someone’s at-will employment because they are acting against the company’s interest isn’t.
From what I have read thus far, this situation sounds a lot more like the latter than the former despite some of the people involved claiming it’s the former.
Perhaps more facts will come out to support that position, but in the meantime I am with the grandparent post. These people want to have their cake (i.e. some of the largest total compensation packages in the industry) and eat it too (force policy by protesting management choices expecting no consequences).
Maybe it's my fault if I didn't explain it well enough, but you don't seem to understand the point I'm making. What I was responding to wasn't whether Google was right or wrong (though I think they're wrong), but instead why it's worth it for lots of people to improve their workplace rather than just quit.
How do you think company culture changes, if not due to people pushing the company in a certain direction?
It seems odd that you don't dispute that companies change, yet seem to dislike people trying to make a company change. Or do you believe it's only bad when the workers want things to change but find it acceptable when upper management fucks over the company culture?
> It seems odd that you don't dispute that companies change, yet seem to dislike people trying to make a company change.
I don’t “dislike” people trying to make a company change. There are ways to change companies from within, discreetly, by building consensus around those things you would like to change. It isn’t easy, and there is no guarantee of success. Often people trying to do exactly that end up losing their positions, or end up not advancing, as a result of being “out of step” with the culture.
That doesn’t appear to be what’s happening here at all, though. You have employees trying to publicly exert pressure on management. You cannot do that and expect no consequences.
You can't retaliate against employees for speaking out publicly and expect no consequences, either. This is going to hurt Google -- in the public eye and with its workforce.
I seriously doubt that. People are busy and have a lot of things to be concerned about. The general perception of SV employees doesn't seem to be very favorable from what I've seen, either within the Bay Area or beyond. The average worker in middle America is not going to feel much compassion for people making $200k a year who end up out of work because they publicly challenge their employer.
> and with its workforce.
That's the calculus that they (Google management) needs to compute. How do they deal with this situation without angering so many people that they end up losing people they want to retain. The other side of that is of course the absolute disinterest in keeping people who are not key contributors but are likely to be "activist".
FWIW, I know ~50 people at Google, and although I am not in touch with most of them on a very regular basis, of the ones I have been in touch with exactly 0 of them have any sympathy for the positions of the people who are making a public scene.
What they are concerned with is the company being seen as a place where people are running amok and the work isn't seen as the first priority by the employees. That can be demoralizing to the rest of the staff who are interested in having impact and can affect recruiting if potential recruits think the company is a big hot mess.
Translating: "People with little experience have ill-formed opinions and thus when you point out the holes in their arguments they cave, whereas experienced people have well-formed opinions which makes it difficult for you when you have weak arguments by which you try to change their opinion."
Younger people don't have fewer opinions from my own experience. They often have plenty of opinions, and with that comes less experience to back them up.
As I've gotten older I've become far less likely to express opinions unless the issue I am offering an opinion on is one that's important, and one that I am able to offer some new perspective on. I wasn't that way at 25.
While we really should just ask the original author to explain, my interpretation is:
younger employees are more likely to simply acquiesce to unreasonable demands like short notice for working late. Or working to prove themselves bc they lack confidence.
Older workers have gained the confidence to ask for what they are worth. Employers do not appreciate this. They may have a more efficient way of working or may not have a singular definition of self (work == my identity) and obligations like family outside of work.
Sounds a lot like 1/12th of a jury.