The Ethical Source Movement

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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