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

[Florian Weimer]

* Coraline Ada Ehmke:

> The Hippocratic License, for example, does not discriminate against
> any person or group, nor against any field of endeavor. It simply
> states that the software may not be used in the commission of human
> rights violations. This is not a liberal vs conservative position;
> it is not a fuzzy grey area that is open to interpretation; it is
> not open to subjective “armchair” interpretation; it does not rely
> on a belief system that varies from person to person or place to
> place. It relies on the collective agreement of representatives from
> all the nations in the world coming together to establish the very
> minimum set of freedoms granted to every living human being.

I agree that this is not a partisan issue, and that the rights
themselves are reasonably clearly defined.

However, there is considerable disagreement who (or which
organizations) can perpetrate human rights violations, and if people
can waive their human rights explicitly or implicitly.  There is no
consensus how to balance one human right against another, or even
whether such considerations are permitted in the first place.

>From a practical point of view, I expect such a license will suffer
from the same fate as copyleft: It is purely a political declaration
because enforcement does not happen all that often, and when it does,
it produces formal compliance without furthering the actual policy
goal.  (In the case of copyleft, that would be publication of the
(largely unmodified) source code, without cutting significantly in to
the proprietary code base, perhaps in combination of stopping the use
of copyleft code.  In the case of the Hippocratic License, I would
expect that violators would just stop using the software—except that I
find it extremely unlikely that it is possible to enforce a copyright
claim that requires proof of a human rights violation, but not
prosecute the human rights violation itself.)