The Arcology Garden

In developing The Complete Computing Environment over the years, I have narrowed my philosophy of Free Software to one that is less about, uhm, creating generically reusable components, but more about holistically increasing the "ambient knowledge" or "ambient connectivity" of the tools I use on the web. I don't really want to be "involved" in a distribution, and I am only glancingly involved in nixpkgs and the NixOS communities, I idle in and help out around the Emacs and org-mode spaces, and I answer questions and I share URLs and I review code, and I recycle all of that in to more knowledge and connectivity.

Let's make something clear, no one is going to pay me enough to work on the things I publish here alone, this software will never ensure that I have a home and food, and so with that in mind I am uninterested in monetization schemes. I intend to make my income in other fashions and keep my public work here free of managerial input, IP ownership issues, "shareholder fiduciary" obligations, parasocial imperatives, etc.

so-called "strong-copyleft" licenses like the GNU GPL 3 or even AGPL are a natural first-choice for me and for quite a while they were my default stance. But strong copyleft only works by threat of copyright law enforcement, and I am not interested in pursuing that anyways, in general, because the United States legal system is a fucking disaster and violent by design. roam:I Fight For the User .

Ultimately, and perhaps unfortunately, i don't care if someone uses my software though as long as they aren't stealing from my mouth, or they aren't stealing my time. If someone I don't like is bothering me for support for my software, I'm more likely than not to drop the software on the ground and run, I've done it before and I'll do it again . and so, if my goal here is to create re-usable snippets of knowledge and prior art for individuals who share my ideals and tribal affiliations, then i can discount most of the "legal issues" and instead make promises at other layers of the stack, and I can make it a pain in the ass for anyone to profit off my work and my ideas and my tools.

These things are "hard to use" on purpose, they should encourage the user to be curious. If someone comes to me asking "how do I X in NixOS" rather than giving them a file they can "just use" or pointing them at my Nix monorepo, they get a URI to my notes on implementing that feature in my own system, as well as the code itself, and can learn how I approached the solution by reading the page I send, and apply some changes themselves. But, in broad terms the "raw code" is not something you can just clone down and use, generally. My software is in a sense "hard" to use on purpose, because I want you to craft your own tools and make them fit you, and in general systems are not malleable enough without this layer of human-touch on top.

So "Hey Smell This" is my embodiment of the idea of sharing things simply for the purpose of being able to share them. These URLs exist with the hope that the ideas in them may be interesting to you, but they are ultimately value-less.

then they fucking suck!

do i care? should i care? what recourse do i have?

text source: :tangle ~/hey-smell-this.txt :comments none
HEY SMELL THIS LICENSE 0.2
(c) Ryan Rix <ry@n.rix.si>

1. Hey smell this
2. Don't use this unless you're really sure you want to
3. If you really want to use this you keep the pieces you end up with.
4. Don't @ me about the pieces you end up with.
5. Distribution must include these .org source files
6. You'll make an effort to work with the .org source rather than tangled source code.
7. "production implementation" is any work involving an invocation or loading of the source code tangled from the org mode documents
8. Distribution of this code or the production implementation may be done under the terms of any other OSI-approved license so long as you include this license in the same location.