The Ethical Source Movement

Hi!

I’m not a licenses expert, but I’m interested in this topic. I remembered the Peer to peer license or copyfarleft:

c. You may exercise the rights granted in Section 3 for commercial purposes only if :
i. You are a worker-owned business or worker-owned collective; and
ii. all financial gain, surplus, profits and benefits produced by the business or collective are distributed among the worker-owners

There is an interesting debate here : Copyfarleft - P2P Foundation

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Quite a fan of this sort of licensing. It has the virality of say the GPL but what it encourages is not simply exposure of the code but also the organisational format and keeps the cash within the cooperative movement.

Really good quality software of this kind (say if someone did the next Nginx…) could convince some that they need to be a cooperative in order to benefit…

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Oh, I didn’t know about that license. Sounds very bueno.

Hey, I’ve started engaging with this work over on the issue tracker Issues · EthicalSource/hippocratic-license · GitHub and asked to join the working group https://ethicalsource.dev/join/. Would be cool to see others getting in on this!

I do think that work shows us the limits of the GPL. It still seems to be the best tool we have for stopping privatisation of the software through sublicensing but Freedom 0 (use for any purpose) is problematic in that at some point, the software freedom stops corresponding to human freedoms (your software is used somewhere in the process of putting kids in a cage, see https://icebreaker.dev). GPL licensed projects got blacklisted by Google and some other megacorps so they were effectively able split the community and delegitimise its use but this work goes straight for the licenses that Google and not-friends love and need, the permissisve style licenses.

There are some interesting developments with the new Hippocratic license versions. They’ve tied it to the UDHR which is a totally not fuzzy ethical position. They’re also working on integrating -H (-Hippocratic) addons to other licenses, like the BSD-H where the ethical elements have become somehow “pluggable” into other licenses. They also seem to be aware of the issues withe permissiveness and copyleft that a number of people have raised on the issue tracker.

It ain’t perfect but I think it’s worth engaging in.

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Do you have a project in mind to use this license on?

I can see the point behind the Coopyleft license for CoopCycle, they want to prevent a non-cooperative competitor from being able to use their code, rather than using the traditional copyleft approach, which would be to force any competitors who did use their code to share improvements with them.

I was just wondering what you think the use case for this license might be?

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When there is a copyleft version of it, I’ll consider using it rather than the GPL.

I’d like to have a copyleft license that includes ethical restrictions for the software I write. For me, the practical benefit is to scare off more bad actors (e.g. GPL’d code is blacklisted by some megacorps). Otherwise, it’s a good awareness raising tool and has already started some heated discussions on ethics in software and what we can do about it.

You’re not into this license or?

I posted some thoughts on this approach in general here:

I’m yet to be convinced, especially when the corporations are pushing open source licenses that allow code to be privatised, that we shouldn’t be uniting behind CopyLeft / Free Software…

Indeed, I wouldn’t use the “forked from MIT” license they have now since you can just sublicense it and away you go back to proprietary world. Copyleft is a must but the overall point is that we can’t just stick to our guns with GPL, Free Software and the usual Copyleft arguments because we’re falling short on the Freedom 0. issue.

To be fair, none of us could probably raise enough resources to even win a copyleft license violation enforcement case so there is definitely limits to the license approach in the first place… but heck, it’s a good tool so far…

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In case people don’t know what this refers to:

A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms: [1]

  • The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
  • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
  • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
  • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

1. The reason they are numbered 0, 1, 2 and 3 is historical. Around 1990 there were three freedoms, numbered 1, 2 and 3. Then we realized that the freedom to run the program needed to be mentioned explicitly. It was clearly more basic than the other three, so it properly should precede them. Rather than renumber the others, we made it freedom 0.

What is Free Software? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

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Fresh off the press.

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Open Source Patching  |  Google Open Source

“You can’t patch projects with any of the following licenses: … Hippocratic License”

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4 posts were split to a new topic: Corporations and the AGPL

I listened to the talk and I’m still not convinced by the concept of the ethical software license, I do however think that refusing to work for these capitalist corporations and boycotting their products and services is a good idea, but alternatives are needed, hence the purpose of Webarchitects is: “the provision of internet based services for socially responsible groups and individuals, using free open source software”.

Seems that to prevent enclosure by corporations one simply has to apply AGPL.

Exactly.

Enforced sharing of digital information is an anathema to capital because it could result in abundance, capital depends on enforced scarcity.

I’d like to see all digital artefacts and the digital designs of everything, (products, buildings, food etc) shared under terms similar to the (A)GPL, not just software, this isn’t something that Richard Stallman agrees with, following is an audio clip of me arguing with him about this 9 years ago… :roll_eyes:.

The above audio clip does illustrate the point that the speaker from the ethical source movement made in the video above, the pioneers of the Free software movement like Stallman are philosophically individualistic, I failed to explain the fundamental, societal implications that would arise from the designs of everything being Free and Stallman could only comprehend the question I put to him in terms of the implications for individual consumers producing their own things.

Perhaps the hack at the core of the Free software movement, using copyright law to enforce sharing rather than the purpose it was designed for, preventing sharing, is about as much as we can hope to achieve through the use of a software license within the current system?

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Agree. My point of view: “For the Free Software Community to survive it must break free from libertarian sentiments and fight its battle into the very center where money runs the software world, the Free Market Economy.” For anyone interested, please read my paper A Business Case for Free Software.

Another good one :wave:

The Culture War in Open Source is On by Nathan Schneider | Model View Culture

is about as much as we can hope to achieve through the use of a software license

I feel like we can also expand the risk for corps in adopting programs with ethical copyleft licenses. Take point 4 where it explains that IBM was worried about the “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil” clause in the JSLint license. That was just a single line and it shook things up.

I like that it is one tool that is part of a broader strategy to escalate. Look at the “what can you do about it” bit in https://icebreaker.dev, using the license was just one part, the rest was fighting talk about resisting and boycotting. We need a leg to stand on when we want to demand restrictions and I don’t think we have that with the current free software definition.

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Adding links to some recent / ongoing experimentation related to these:

  1. Its creators have the right to prohibit its use by individuals or organizations engaged in human rights violations or other behavior that they deem unethical.

This addresses the problem of free software being used for purposes that the original author / copyright holder do not support. This problem is common in other works of authorship as well, like articles or photographs. There is this text in the Canadian Copyright Act:

be deemed to be reserved to the author a right to restrain the publication of the work

https://copyright.ubc.ca/public-domain/

I wonder if similar language has been explored re: use of software. As others have pointed out, this would violate Freedom 0.

  1. Its creators have the right to solicit reasonable and voluntary compensation from the communities or institutions that benefit from the software.

Without leverage to demand pay, open source encourages profiting off of unpaid labour, and kills project sustainability and contributor diversity:

Marginalized people in tech - women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others - have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity.

The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community | ashe dryden

License Zero has done some work in this. There were some discussions on this thread.

Related post on open source consumerism.

Personally, I think AGPL is the best license we have now, and is the license I choose to use for most software, but I also believe we should seek better licenses that are enforceable and GPL-compatible, and has better ways of addressing 4 and 5 above.

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(Sorry if I’m wrecking everyones head on this thread :see_no_evil:)

The bit where it gets tricky is that a lot of these new licenses are not GPL compatible and they don’t meet the current definitions of the FSF/OSI (Not sure if you were aware of that, so just wanted to clarify).

The Hippocratic license people are taking the approach that they can maybe get OSI to approach this license but if not, have other plans. The NPL/CNPL gang don’t seem to be much bothered with meeting the FSF definition unless it changes. From https://thufie.lain.haus/NPL.html:

A Note to those concerned about “Free Software”
The Non-Violent Public License intentionally does not meet the Free Software Definition because of the restrictions put in place to protect others from violence aided by the use of the copyrighted work. “Freedom 0” is explicitly violated to afford these protections and prevent unethical usage of the program to actually Free Society .This license does preserve freedoms 1-3 and can be referred to as a “three freedoms” license. Similarly to the GNU AGPL this license has the additional requirement that server-side source code modifications to public-facing server software must be published for users as well as the usual expectations for FLOSS software with the exception of restrictions on Freedom 0 for ethical purposes.

There are some interesting push-backs to these new licenses like the creator of sourcehut thinking about enforcing FSF/OSI/CC approved licenses https://cmpwn.com/@sir/104204252170225382.

:bomb:

Yes I understand that these licenses are usually not GPL-compatible particularly due to Freedom 0, and previous attempts to use them have been met with great resistance from Free Software zealots, often times without acknowledging the harms, labour extraction, and lack of diversity in “open source” that are reinforced by Freedom 0.

“4 prohibit use” is probably in direct contradiction with Freedom 0. While we can build new software with a non-GPL-compatible license, software that are built on top of GPL code cannot use them. In such cases, I wonder if one solution is to adopt a new license that is both GPL-compatible and has broader scope than the GPL itself (like the AGPL) as to make it basically unusable by most commercial entities or closed communities.

“5 solicit reasonable and voluntary compensation” is probably still GPL compatible? I think some dual licensing model, like:

Prosperity, noncommercial license, then sell private licenses through licensezero.com

could be a way forward for FOSS sustainability.

I don’t really have answers, or know too much about software licenses, but am interested in new licenses and am open to adopt for my own software. 4 and 5 are compatible with how I’d personally like to license my software, as is strong copyleft, and I also recognize the importance of GPL-compatibility in many use cases.

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A couple of recent progressions I find very interesting in what I see broadly as a “post-F(L)OSS ethical tech” movement:

The interesting bit to me is thinking beyond just considerations about licensing.

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