[License-discuss] Thoughts on the subject of ethical licenses

Russell McOrmond russellmcormond at gmail.com
Wed Mar 11 12:44:32 UTC 2020


On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 11:32 PM Grahame Grieve <
grahame at healthintersections.com.au> wrote:

> The question for me is whether there's some useful middle ground. Is there
> value in having an ethical use license where the creator gives up many but
> not all rights, in a way that respects some core tenets of the open source
> movement, and where the ethical restrictions are careful, and that this
> place, while not proper open source, is still a recognisable benefit with a
> name like Ethical Public Source or something?
>

You have to define and have agreement on the concept of "useful" if you
want to come up with a useful middle ground.

Using the term "ethical" puts a value judgement on the whole policy
discussion.  One of the first things you learn in politics is to avoid this
type of divisive language as you immediately come off as suggesting that
anyone that disagrees with your policy goals is "unethical".  You
immediately put people on the defensive, who will then question just how
"ethical" what you are doing is and look for any thing (small or large) to
find fault with.

This language had made it extremely hard to be honest in these
conversations without getting close to what list moderators will want to
filter. Language is important, and many in the US and elsewhere would quite
legitimately be extremely offended if the U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agency renamed themselves at the U.S. Immigration and Customs
Ethics agency.

I'll try to use "public policy source" as a substitute that is not so
immediately divisive.


I have believed for most of my adult life that sofware owners (copyright
and patent holders, given the authors are most often forced to give away
all their rights to an employer/etc) have too much unaccountable and
non-transparent power in our society.  In order to protect the public (you
can call this protection of human rights, but that term is subjectively
defined) we need to reduce that control.


Traditional FLOSS licenses encourage exclusive rights holders to waive that
control.  Some licenses are non-reciprocol in that the waiving is voluntary
for derivative works, and some licenses are reciprocol in that the waiving
is mandatory for derivative works.   While there is policy in these
licenses, the policy was always about waiving that control.   Any other
policy was traditionally understood as off-topic and counterproductive, an
understanding we came to in the 1990's when many people had these same
types of conversations.



As an individual, and representing a variey of FLOSS affiliated groups over
the decades, I have promoted this policy of reducing the control that
sofware owners have in the regular policy process.  I have sat down with
politicians and discussed the need to reduce the control that software
owners have.  It isn't only that I want FLOSS authors to voluntarily waive
this control, but that I have been advocating for decades that this control
not exist in the law at all.   In what I would consider to be an ideal
world we woldn't be having this conversation, as no software owner would
have the ability to impose in license agreements the type of unaccountable
control that the "public policy source" movement wishes to harness.






The only way a middle-ground can be found is to separate the policies which
the "public policy source" movement wants to encourage from the licensing
of software.  There are many things that software authors should be doing
around the protection of human rights and other public policy, and so few
are involved at all.  When I speak to politicians (including in committee
hearings) I am most often the first and/or only actual software author that
they have heard from.   Those of us trying to protect society from the
abuses of software need to become more politically involved, and having
support organizations to organize us would be very helpful.

Trying to bypass the political process and encourage authors exert their
excessive control over society to impose their own policy goals is a huge
threat to human rights and the public good.   Whether or not I agree or
disagree with your stated goals (policy of a software group, belief that
ICE is violating basic human rights, etc) doesn't matter, and I consider
any discussion of those policies to be strawman arguments.  It is the
method of trying to achieve these goals that is being discussed, and trying
to harness rather than reduce the excessive control that software owners
have over society is harmful.


A different phrasing might be, do the managers of opensource.org believe in
> all or nothing? Personally, I think that it's consistent with the open
> source philosophy to encourage creators to be as open as they can be, and
> not to encourage the more predatory aspects of proprietary source just
> because it''s not wholly open source. Noting that I, of course, am just an
> opinion holder, not someone who is important.
>

I'm not sure why it is opensource.org that should be giving up on what many
of us consider to be "ethical" software policies in order to allow others
to use hard earned positive brand recognition in order to encourage
policies which some of us consider to be a great risk to human rights?

I don't see it as a middle ground that is being asked for, but being asked
to give up on what many of us consider to be the core principles.

I personally don't care how "open" a creator believes they are. In the days
when many FLOSS developers were at the height of anger against Microsoft,
Microsoft had agreements with academic and other institutions to have full
access to source code.  Even earlier than that Microsoft was far more open
(interoperable with open hardware specifications, etc) than the more closed
vendors such as Apple.

Do you believe Microsoft should be considered a founding participant in the
Open Source movement, given they have always been more open (including with
their source code) than many of their competitors?


-- 
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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