[License-discuss] Ethical open source licensing - Dual Licensing for Justice

[Jim Jagielski]

> On Mar 6, 2020, at 3:52 AM, Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
> 
> * Eric Schultz:
> 
>> Description:
>> The idea for Dual Licensing for Justice comes from, you guessed it, dual
>> licensing and my own experience with the [license for the Houdini Project](
>> https://github.com/houdiniproject/houdini/blob/master/LICENSE) which I help
>> lead. It's additionally inspired by the GPLvX-or-later license notice. In
>> this tactic, a strong copy-left license could apply to the software. The
>> community would draft a special exception to that license which grants all
>> users except a set of listed entities the right to use the software under a
>> more permissive license. As an example, consider the following, utterly
>> non-legally valid special exception:
>> ---
>> As a special exception to the normal AGPLv3 license, all users except
>> Amazon and their employees may choose, to redistribute and/or modify this

>> software under the LGPLv3 license.
>> ---
>> This special exception makes clear who the community considers a bad actor
>> and initially imposes greater obligations on them than anyone else. That
>> said, I strongly believe it is FSD compatible and also believe it is OSD
>> compatible. All parties receive a set of rights and obligations that comply
>> with both definitions.
> 
> Does the GPL, version 3, go in that direction?  It does not mention
> Microsoft, Novell, or SUSE by name, but if I recall correctly, a lot
> of the patent-related language was inspired by a business transaction
> between those companies the GPL authors deemed unethical.

The above message and reply got me thinking... I know, dangerous :)

Just say that, for example, we were having this discussion 10 years ago, and that the elephant in the room, as persona-non-grata was Microsoft. And say that there was s/w that was under such an ethical license that prevented or severely restricted Microsoft from using it (or leveraging it), either from a legal or a social standpoint... My conclusion is that we would not today be seeing Microsoft and being as much in the FOSS camp as they are now. In effect, we would have actively prevented a persona-non-grata from becoming a persona-grata (is that even a thing?).

If you make it harder for people to use FOSS, then they won't, and we will lose more and more converts. Considering the churn and discussions going on today, among long-time open source advocates and believers, what with is basically anti-AWS clauses attached to ALv2 because they chose the "wrong" license to start with, from a business model aspect, I think we would be shooting ourselves in the foot.

Again, I personally like the idea of ethical open source, but I don't see how it fits into the OSD, nor should it. As an external branch, ala InnerSource, it makes better sense.

Cheers!