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

[Russell McOrmond]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 10:28 AM Jim Jagielski <jim at jimjag.com> wrote:

> 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?).
>

This is one of the many reasons why a "policy-non-grata" and a
"persona-non-grata" are to me entirely unrelated concepts.

When you have a license agreement that discusses specific policy goals, and
doesn't grant a license if you carry out specific activities incompatible
with those goals, that isn't as quickly going to come up against the
non-discrimination core of software freedom.

As soon as you name names (individuals or groups) you are closing the door
to that specific name using your software or adopting your policy.  By
accusing an entity of being "wrong" as opposed to a policy being "wrong"
you are only trying to punish a brand name as opposed to trying to achieve
a policy goal.

The goal should be to encourage entities to adopt your policy goal, not to
discourage them and anyone who disagrees with your evaluation of specific
entities.



I am also not interested in the concept of "ethical source" as I don't
believe a universal concept of "ethics" exists.

Even if we claim that "protecting human rights" is as far as we go with
ethics, we don't even agree on that.

Even at the level of the UN UDRH https://www.un
.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ you have fundamental
disagreements between the agencies which the UN has created based on
opposing interpretations of those human rights.   It is quite common for
the WTO and WIPO to be on the opposite sides of policy debates as UNESCO
and WHO.  It won't surprise anyone to learn that I have a strong opinion on
who has the "more ethical" interpretation of human rights, and that I've
yet to have an example where I sided with the WTO or WIPO in a policy
disagreement with UNESCO or WHO.

In case anyone isn't familiar with the agencies the UN has created,
theoretically based on the UDHR, see https://www.un.org/en/sections/about-un
/funds-programmes-specialized-agencies-and-others/index.html -- you may
even be surprised that some of these agencies are attached to the UN, or
claim to be based on protecting human rights.


I don't want to sound like some old fart, and have someone send an
"OK Boomer" at me, but my experience over the decades is that those who
want to focus on some universal idea of ethics are generally people who
don't yet have much political experience.   I was idealistic in my teens
and twenties, but after many decades of political involvement no longer
believe in utopian ideals.


I have many policies which I consider to be in the public interest that I
promote, but I don't claim that my idea of what is in the public interest
is universal.  I know there will be people who disagree, and in a democracy
it is about convincing the majority of the merit of your policies.


If you make it harder for people to use FOSS, then they won't, and we will
> lose more and more converts.


I've yet to be convinced that the AGPL or "ethical source" licensing would
change behaviour other than having fewer people using or contributing to
that software than would otherwise have happened with a traditional FLOSS
license.  This is one area that I see similarities between AGPL and
"ethical source".

If splintering the community and creating many small silos is your policy
goal it makes sense, but if you want to encourage organisations to adopt
specific policies it seems counterproductive.

The silos created with the use of AGPL have been noticed by Bradley M.
Kuhn, one of the architects behind this license, according to his blog
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2020/01/06/copyleft-equality.html .

Bradley and I appear to disagree on the reasoning for the balkanization.
He believes that proprietary re-licensing is the problem.  I believe that
once you move away from software freedom (which in my mind has always meant
freedom from excessive control by software authors over software users),
towards punishing what a software developer considers unethical behaviour
(the problem some people have with cloud service providers falls into
that), then you are going to split software projects based on differing
political philosophies of developers.


In Bradley's blog he mentions Richard Fontana's copyleft next discussion....
https://github.com/copyleft-next/copyleft-next/blob/master/Drafts/copyleft-next

While I like the "Nullification of Copyleft/Proprietary Dual Licensing"
suggestion in copyleft-next as it is consistent with the goals of software
freedom, I oppose the "Network Services" clause which I consider harmful.
It is not enough that I can opt out of that clause in a license, as I
believe everyone who is trying to protect software freedom should be
discouraging software copyright holders from thinking they have the right
to dictate to service providers (who are software users, and should be
protected from excessive control by software authors -- ie: software
freedom.  The users of a cloud service are cloud service users, not
software users).

Would I contribute to a copyleft-next project, even one where the "first"
developer opted out of that clause?  Probably not.

I know I've strayed away from "ethical source", but I believe we have
enough controversies with licenses which the FSF and OSI have already
approved that we really should avoid changing the scope of the OSD to
diverge further away from the policies we were trying to accomplish in the
1990's.

-- 
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>

"The government, lobbied by legacy copyright holders and hardware
manufacturers, can pry my camcorder, computer, home theatre, or portable
media player from my cold dead hands!" http://c11.ca/own
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