Lemmy (pun intended) answer my own question here: Yes, it’s relative hight along the river’s centerline: https://opentopography.org/blog/new-package-automates-river-relative-elevation-model-rem-generation

Please tell me more about “Relative Elevation Model”. Are those elevations in the river’s surroundings relative to the river’s water surface height? Or something else?

Honest question: “Without any authority who gets to enforce the rules?”. Everyone, as they see fit it seems. What makes “your” hierarchy better than “my” hierarchy?

Disagree. If FOSS were an anarchism what would be the point of FOSS lincences of which some are very long legal documents? Also corporations would just take your code, say its theirs and tell you to go fuck yourself.

Yes, I agree. And Creative Commons are a great example of peoples’ control over their work. My argument is that it wont be ‘the original artist’ who gets to interpret the licensing terms.

If I may take your example of border patrol abusing immigrants with your software. And I’m sorry for the trivial example beforehand.

Let’s say you put in licensing terms: “This software may not be used to endanger peoples lives and/or livelyhoods”. And software is used by both Border Patrol and the immigrants to protect/cross the border.

Both parties come before a judge, accusing the other party of misusing your software. Border patrol says the immigrants are endangering american people with crime etc. ,and the immigrants accuse the border patrol of violent beatings.

In whose favor would a judge decide?

P.S.: thanks for the link. I’m a huge Tom Waits fan, and had no idea about the voice-theft.

While we might not agree with immigration policy and power abuse, it’s hard to put moral limitations on who gets to use our software. While the example you gave is far from trivial.

The second we say someone can’t use our software for whatever reason, that’s the second the software is no longer truly free. It’s same with Open data.

If you set in writing that your software can be used by anyone, then you also take away the power of those in high places to interpret the licence in a discriminatory way.

That may be true, but there is (usually) also an upside. Any fixes and modifications must be shared back. Thank you copyleft licenses. Thank you GPL.

Damn, how’d that get me :)