Hi all,
Before write what I am about to write, I would like to be clear that this is a very controversial topic and, for the eyes of many of you, this will be even silly.
I also know that open source means “open for everyone”, and any conditional to that automatically makes a piece of software non-open source.
I really feel pissed off to see such effort for brilliant people from open source community being used for terrible things. So I started to nurture the idea of a license that would forbid the usage of a project by totalitarian governments, including its department and contractors, military forces of any country, certain entities like radical political parties, etc. Basically limiting the usage of those projects to any activity promoting human suffering.
Do you guys think that this is utopic? Does it really hurt the essence of open source? Do you think in the same way about this, and if yes, how do you cope with that?
Did you have a look on ethical licenses? For example, Coraline Ada Hemke who created the Contributor Covenant (famous code of conduct) started few years ago the Organisation for Ethical Source promoting “ethical” licenses defined by seven principles.
So in fact this third family of licenses is not open source nor free (as defined by OSI and FSF), nevertheless I feel some needs or willings in your side to go, let’s say, “one step further”.
In ethical licenses you can find for example 999 ICU, ACAB, Anti-Capitalist, Peer Production, Hippocratic or some BSD 3-Clause variants about nuclear topics.
You can also have a look on that slidedeck (in French, sorry).
Licenses don’t stop bombs. In general, informational freedoms always benefits the stronger actor, because they already have the means to exploit the information better than other actors. Legal restrictions are just a bump in the road if what you produced is really really valuable for a corporation or a state entity: they can reimplement it, exploiting the design and “trial-and-error” work embedded in whatever you produced, or they can simply ignore licenses because nobody is going to ask the Israeli’s military to respect a license when they are slaughtering civilians.
Social problems never have technical solutions.
If you want to make software that is not captured by state or corporate power, you must create software that is incompatible with whatever they need to do. Embed a social logic that is worthless to their system but useful to our system. Anything else is eventually going to be captured. There’s a lot of literature on anti-capture design, and some of it manages to rise above the purely techno-optimist logic and provide something useful.
I think this is not exactly the point. I never thought that license would fight rocket. Nor I thought that an authoritarian regime would respect license.
The first point affects more countries and companies that still keep ties with those regimes.
The second point is to have a clear position. For me it is hypocritical to say “open source for a better world” at the same time that we say “how my contributions are used is not my problem”.
I bet with you that commo libraries like slf4j, junit, poetry, fastapi, etc. are being used by those regimes and their associates very often. Make a license more restrictive would create legal problems for any legitimate foreign entity to buy from those regimes. If they opt to re-inplement those libraries, it’s fine as well: tons of resources and money expended by those jerks.
Even commercial licenses are problematic to enforce, I know. But send a clear message seems a point where our hands can reach and worth to pursue.
the logic that sending messages alters political reality is part of the overall problem. Politics is a conflict of forces, not a conflict of ideas or opinions. A license is as powerful as the will of the state power behind it to enforce it. Otherwise, it is powerless.
If you want to make sense of the political world, I invite to move beyond the idea of “taking stances” or expressing positions as a political act, and reason instead of what incentives and powers you’re altering with your political actions.
What you describe just does not play out in real life: neither on a micro scale nor on a macro scale.
There’s a lot of literature on anti-capture design
Could you please point me to some links? I was unable to find anything on a cursory internet search, all the results were about preventing screen grabs
This is a good starting point: https://trent.mirror.xyz/GDDRqetgglGR5IYK1uTXxLalwIH6pBF9nulmY9zarUw
Much better to add features to your software that make it unusable in totalitarian situations.
For example
- if you’re building a reddit clone, make each subreddit elect their moderators every few months.
- Maybe ask How fat is Kim Jon Un during installation.
- Display the text “Taiwan is not a part of China” in the status bar, randomly
…and so on. The possibilities are endless.
The great power of open source is the ability to fork and patch your suggested bullshit out. ☺️
Projects like Bitcoin and Matrix are what’s going to fix these countries, not a license.
