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

[Russell McOrmond]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 11:30 AM Gil Yehuda via License-discuss <
license-discuss at lists.opensource.org> wrote:

> If you strip away dog whistling and provocative terms that often bring out
> less productive discussions, there is something similar here to other
> "source-available but restricted" ideas. The generic shape of the argument
> in simplified form:
>
> 1. I created this code.
> 2. I seek to display it for others to see. Perhaps comment, improve, or at
> least recognize me for it.
> 3. I seek to allow many people to use this code too.
> 4. For a particular set of reasons, I don't want some people or entities
> to use my code.
> 5. I want people who can use my code to be unable to circumvent my
> restriction in #4.
> 6. I might have other statements I want to make that are preserved in the
> project.
>


I wish we could strip away the word "ethical" which is the core provocative
term pervading the less productive parts of the discussion.


For the friction-less collaboration of Open Source to work,  #4, #5 and #6
can't exist.   As soon as they do, you then have something that creates
much more friction for collaboration than the license proliferation problem
often discussed in these forums.  To avoid "offending" people, and being
claimed to be "unethical", you need to learn the personal politics and
personal interpretation of political language of all the authors (or most
often, copyright and patent holders and employers often take control away
from the actual authors).  That simply doesn't scale, so makes the whole
point of being open pointless from a collaboration perspective.

The way Open Source works is that is is *DELIBERATELY* not author centric.
It is not an accident, or something that could be reworded in the OSD to
"fix".  Trying to create something that is author centric, regardless of
the policy that any individual author may wish to promote, is obviously
going to be incomparable.


The concept of proprietary software has existed since the 1970's or 80's,
depending on your jurisdiction, when software not printed on paper (IE: in
books) became clearly covered by copyright law.  It is nothing new, nor is
the concept of "freeware" where the copyright holder don't charge royalties
for the software and yet have other restrictions of interest to the
copyright holder.  This has included from the beginning proprietary
software that is distributed with source code, as availability of source
code is a separate concept from whether it is proprietary or not (in fact,
in the early days distributing binaries was largely useless as the only way
to run software on your particular hardware was often to compile it on that
machine).


What was new was the Free Software and later Open Source response, which
was to deliberately move away from the author-centric (or rather, copyright
and later patent-holder centric) legal framework that was growing.  That
proprietary legal framework has been ongoing, and copyright/patent/etc
holders are getting more and more powerful every day to the detriment of
the rest of society.


To turn around and suggest that Free Software and Open Source software
would somehow be "better" if we became more proprietary (= author centric)
is to miss the entire point.

What the Microsoft Github generation some seem to want to talk about is the
same thing that other proprietary authors have wanted for generations now.
It is unfortunate that they want to harness the positive brand recognition
of "Open Source" to do something which predates and was deliberately
rejected by those who founded "Open Source".


I see an unfortunate trademark dispute in the future, as it is obviously
harmful for this proprietary (= author centric) software group to create
confusion about what open source (collaborative community, software user,
computer owner, society, etc centric) is.

-- 
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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