WASHINGTON — In a move that sent shockwaves through the tech industry, former President Donald Trump signed an executive order today declaring all open-source code “un-American” and making its creation, distribution, or use punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison. “Nobody knew code could be free. It’s terrible, folks. Terrible,” Trump declared from his Mar-a-Lago residence. “Real Americans pay for their software, and they pay big league. That’s what made this country great.” The controversial order, scrawled in gold Sharpie on the back of a McDonald’s receipt, specifically targets what Trump called “socialist programmer communes” like GitHub and Linux. It requires all software to be developed behind closed doors and sold at “whatever price the market can bear, plus 50%.” Tech industry leaders were quick to respond, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reportedly doing backflips in his office while shouting “Windows forever!” Meanwhile, Linux creator Linus Torvalds was last seen attempting to seek political asylum in Finland, muttering something about “git push” and “force shutdown -h now.” The order has created particular confusion in the government sector, where thousands of federal websites running on open-source software suddenly became illegal. The White House’s own website temporarily displayed a blue screen of death with the message “ERROR: FREEDOM.EXE NOT FOUND.” “This is a great day for American software,” said Trump’s newly appointed Chief of Proprietary Code Enforcement, a sentient copy of Windows Vista. “We’re going to make coding great again by putting it behind the biggest, most beautiful paywalls you’ve ever seen.” At press time, a underground resistance movement of developers had already formed, sharing code snippets via an elaborate network of Morse code signals sent through reprogrammed coffee makers.
Making open source illegal? Probably not.
Removing the copyleft licensing to allow corporate entities to take ownership of open source code? Absolutely - in fact, I don’t think it’s premature to assume that most creative commons and open source licensing cases will fail in court in a Trump administration.
So in a world where licenses become meaningless in the US, how should we proceed? I’m happy to “pirate” what used to be open since the source is available. Do we just try to anonymize developer identities and everything becomes “published in the EU” ;) , because that’s fine with me.
in a world where licenses are meaningless you have either just killed the economy stone fucking dead or you have effectively abolished copyright as a whole.
The oligarch corpos are not subject to the same rule of law. They can steal your work, and you will sent to the gulag for not giving your code to them sooner.
Let’ssss goooooo!
I’m worried that when it comes to it Trump’s appointed supreme court will invalidate the GPL.
They absolutely will. Can you imagine how much money Linux would be worth if everyone who uses it had to pay a licensing fee to Oracle? There’s a reason Ellison is on the Trump train - there’s a lot of gravy available to him once open source protections go away, and he’s been fighting this battle for 10 years. Expect Google v. Oracle to go the way of the Roe v. Wade.