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

[Pamela Chestek]

Please do avoid attaching points of view to any specific characteristic
of a group or individual, whether it's gender, age, nationality,
ethnicity, religion, hair color, or Star Wars/Star Trek. It's an easy
way to offend someone you didn't mean to offend and then any valid point
you hoped to make will be missed entirely.

Just some other thoughts:

A lot of idioms, metaphors and slang are offensive, but we don't realize
it because we're so used to them. They are also often confusing to a
speaker of a different native language. Words may also have different
degrees of offensiveness depending on the culture. As plain,
non-rhetorical English as you can manage will the be easiest for
everyone to understand and the least likely to unintentionally offend.

Pam

Pamela Chestek
Chair, License Review Committee
Open Source Initiative

On 3/12/2020 12:48 PM, Russell McOrmond wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 11:30 AM Gil Yehuda via License-discuss
> <license-discuss at lists.opensource.org
> <mailto: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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