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

[Russell McOrmond]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 8:45 AM Eric Schultz <eric at wwahammy.com> wrote:

> We need a set of options, licensing or otherwise, that uphold the OSD and
> FSD and allow them to make some different on the other issues in the world.
> I'm trying to explore the licensing topic here.
>

Why does someone "need" that.

I don't believe what you are looking for is possible, and in fact believe
any attempt at doing so will be counterproductive.

If there was wide agreement on these other issues, what was and wasn't
ethical, the issues wouldn't still exist.  The fact these issues still
exist means that there are still large disagreements in society, and
labeling people you politically disagree with as "unethical" will always be
extremely divisive.

OSD and FSD are set up to solve very specific software related problems,
and to get wide adoption of a way of thinking which helps to reduce those
problems.  Introducing other political concepts will only make Open Source
and Free Software smaller, to the detriment of trying to solve the specific
problems it was set up to address.


Documentation that is legally mandatory to be distributed with software
(preamble in license, etc) which discusses those software related issues is
on-topic for a FLOSS license, which is why the content in the GPL is
generally considered acceptable.   Diverge away from software specific
policies and you are expressing topics which are counterproductive to the
goals of FLOSS.

-- 
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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