Adding links to some recent / ongoing experimentation related to these:
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
I wonder if similar language has been explored re: use of software. As others have pointed out, this would violate Freedom 0.
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.
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.
(Sorry if Iâm wrecking everyones head on this thread )
The bit where it gets tricky is that a lot of these new licenses are not GPL compatible and they donât 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 donât 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 âFree Softwareâ
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. âFreedom 0â 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 âthree freedomsâ 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.
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 âopen sourceâ that are reinforced by Freedom 0.
â4 prohibit useâ 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.
â5 solicit reasonable and voluntary compensationâ is probably still GPL compatible? I think some dual licensing model, like:
I donât 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 Iâd personally like to license my software, as is strong copyleft, and I also recognize the importance of GPL-compatibility in many use cases.
A couple of recent progressions I find very interesting in what I see broadly as a âpost-F(L)OSS ethical techâ movement:
https://techautonomy.org/ - We demand a world in which technology is created to protect and empower the people who use it.
https://communalsoftware.codeberg.page/ - By âcommunal softwareâ, we mean software that is constructed by and for the people whose lives are affected by its use.
The interesting bit to me is thinking beyond just considerations about licensing.