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branon11/04/20252 repliesview on HN

There appear to be ulterior sociopolitical motives held by the author, which involve using the blanket term "genocide-friendly software" [1] to refer to anything OSI-licensed (implicitly suggesting all contributors to anything not using his homebrewed license are supporters of genocide?)

This does not look like a technical or business decision, but rather a malicious function used to identify users (and/or their employers) for arbitrary reasons, under the guise of "licensing compliance."

[1] https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi-license?tab=readme-ov-fil...


Replies

jeroenhd11/04/2025

While the whole genocide thing is a bit of an odd angle (though hardly a new one, the author themselves links to the FSF statement on free software used for evil), I get the idea of checking for corporate installs.

The next step wouldn't be anything crazy like "MDM detected, send invoice to corporate"; there are too many false positives. It's better to use the MDM profile information to filter out the larger corporate MDM providers (InTune etc.) and filter out school MDMs before taking any action.

Most software isn't important enough to pirate if the company in question needs to comply with certain standards (ISO etc.) where an auditor might catch such a popup and make it a problem. Plus, IT probably wants you to stop downloading freeware onto corporate devices anyway. Risking being slightly annoying to people with corporate devices may very well help more people than it hurts.

Most software license violations I've spotted were purely accidental, at least at the start. An (occasional?) popup saying "hey, you need a corporate license to use this product for business use" may be enough to scare people away from your software (ending the violation). Convincing someone with financial power to buy your software is harder than making people seek out an alternative, but at least your software is less likely to be used by freebooters.

WatchDog11/05/2025

He describes OSI licenses as “genocide-friendly”, and links to the OSI page about how their licenses don’t prohibit the software being used for “evil”.

Yet his own license also has no such prohibition. You are free to commit genocide using his tiling window manager, provided that your genocide is strictly non-commercial.