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

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Russell Nelson (nelson at crynwr.com):

> On 3/6/20 10:07 AM, Jim Jagielski wrote:
> >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.
> 
> I do NOT like the idea of ethical open source. It completely turns the
> idea of "forking without permission" into "you can only run this
> software if I think you are a good person."

If you don't mind a slight correction, Russell:  As presented, Eric
Schultz's idea wasn't _quite_ 'You can run this software only if I think
you're a good person', but rather was 'Your participation will be
refused by the organisation in charge of this codebase, because someone
within said organisation declared you a bad person' (paraphrased,
obviously).

During discussion, it became obvious that Eric and several other people
were consistently failing to spot a key category error Eric was making:
He forgot that, in open source, a codebase _cannot_ be controlled by
some group, specifically because under OSD #3 (and other OSD clauses
articulating the right to fork), any party is fully free at any time to
redistribute and develop the code independently.  The project doesn't
control the code.  (If it did, then such code by definition wouldn't be
open source.)

Thus my comment that Eric had made a category error:  He really was
seeking to constrain  _project governance_, not codebase licensing.  That's
why, when he raised these ideas on his blog last December, he wrote
there that he'd already been advised that the right way to implement his
concerns was in a project's Code of Conduct or a similar place, not in a
licence text.  IMO, he should have listened then.

-- 
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