Or maybe a catchier name would be a “basic human decency GPL extension”
I can’t help but notice that organisations constantly co-opt free software which was developed with the intent to promote freedom, use it to spread hate and ideas which will ultimately infringe on freedom for many.
The fact that hateful people who use such software may then go on to use it to promote or otherwise support fascism which prevents others from enjoying the software in the way it was imagined, is one potential manifestation of the paradox of tolerance in this respect. I think this is particularly true for e.g. social media platforms and the fediverse.
My proposal to combat this would be the introduction of a “paradox of tolerance” license which says that organisations which use the software must enforce a bare-minimum set of rules to combat intolerance. So anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, etc. The idea is then to make overtly hateful organisations legally liable for the use of the software through the incompatibility of the requirements with their hateful belief system.
This could be an extension to GPL and AGPL where the license must be replicated in modified versions of the software, thereby creating virality with these rules.
Is this a thing already? I understand OS and FOSS have historically had a thing for political neutrality but are we not starting to find the faults with this now?
No, thanks. I don’t want to see “Users from North Korea, Syria and Iran are not allowed to use this Project” I am already banned from half of the Internet due to sanctions against the asshole leaders of my country. And GitLab has already banned Iranian IP addresses. This license will not stop those big bad organizations or governments, but the average citizen from accessing the projects. I know it is not the purpose of the license to prohibit the citizens of hateful regimes to use the projects, but I can’t be optimistic about the effect it might have on people living under tyrannical regimes.
Strictly speaking I think such provisions would be unenforceable in those circumstances anyway so doesn’t the effect kind of cancel out? Don’t get me wrong I get where you’re coming from but why would we imagine such a license has an effect in nations that are already hostile to those ideas and probably have broken judicial systems anyway?
I think such a licence would need very careful wording. Wording that concentrates on the entity or organisation using rather then jurisdiction.
GPL claims free as in speech not beer. Whereas this would be removing that very concept. By suggesting use for some ideas is not allowed.
I can def see the advantage. Especially for people developing social software. But trying to form a licence like that. While not running fowl of existing GPL restrictions. Would take some seriose legal understanding. As making gpled current libraries incompatible. Could totally remove existing work to expand upon. Removing most developers desire to place the effort needed for the new software.
Would be interesting to watch the project form though. Unfortunately it would be very much like watching a dangerous stunt. Facinating as much for the risk of failure as that of hoping for success.
There are licences like this already
- https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:THL-1.1
- https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:ANTI-1.4
- https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:HESSLA
None of which have ever caught on, and none of which are open source.
You would also be making it potentially illegal to use in many countries.
Strictly speaking these all do something similar-ish at face value but actually quite different in terms of mechanism and target. I think the unpopularity of a lot of these licensing structures is also down to lack of legal verification in a lot of cases.
The illegality possibility does warrant careful consideration, but I suspect in many cases regimes which would oppose this kind of license would be making the use and enforcement of software fairly selective in any case. If it is made illegal, it’s made illegal by the respective government, not the software author or license writer.
A question is then raised as to what degree the implied open source requirement that open source should be leveraged by e.g. Nazis actually benefits developers and users. Or whether it is in effect a kind of appeasement as no doubt use which contradicts those values (and hence promotes freedom) is illegal already. Those uses which are orthogonal to that aim may be selectively targeted for arbitrary reasons such as the identity of the user.
Only the good bad-guys will obey the terms of the license.
@CapriciousDay@lemmy.ml we already did this a decade ago with the Do No Evil license in https://www.json.org/license.html and learned the approach is not compatible with FOSS. Projects have added a layer of accountability with contributor agreements, but those only limit your ability to participate in the development of the project directly. They don’t limit your rights to do what you want with the code.
