[License-discuss] How can we as a community help empower authors outside license agreements?

[Russell McOrmond]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 7:22 PM Gil Yehuda via License-discuss <
license-discuss at lists.opensource.org> wrote:

> I think part of the issue here is that in the face of real human issues,
> this seems like a misuse of energy. Licenses manage the use of copyright
> rights. We fight genocide with laws, with armies, maybe a good protest or
> two?
>

I've participated in those protests and discussed those laws with policy
makers, but the part of my personal activism that I believe is the most
effective does relate to copyright and related government granted
exclusivity.

I spent much of my life trying to make fellow software authors transparent
and accountable for the policies that their software and licenses inflicted
upon society.  This will do far more to protect against geonocide committed
with the use of technology than those who work against this ethical goal
and try to convince authors that being for or against geonocide is
something that should be allowed to be encoded in software or softare
license agreements.

While the discussion of geonocide may have been contrived, it it
still useful to illustrate the problem.  I believe that not only is the
descrimination that the "ethical" source movement not compatable with the
open source development methodology and the variety of communities it is
compatable with, I also believe it is counterproductive to the stated goal
of reducing the threat of geonocide.
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