It's literally the MIT license with an added clause of only using the software for good, not evil.
Obviously, corporate attorneys will advise not to use the software since good and evil aren't really well defined legal terms. It's also not open source using the osi definition.
CC-BY-NC allows you to ban commercial use. There is also the Hippocratic licence[2] which allows you to choose from a variety of "evil corporation" types, from fossil fuels, mineral exploration, the Taliban, companies that have more than 200% pay inequity, etc.
Pretty much all of these licences will make your project unusable and no longer free software, but hey, they exist!
> Prevent any person from exercising his/her/their right to seek an effective remedy by a competent court or national tribunal (including domestic judicial systems, international courts, arbitration bodies, and other adjudicating bodies) for actions violating the fundamental rights granted to him/her/them by applicable constitutions, applicable laws, or by this License
There's also a clause allowing for specific performance which means, by using the licence for anything at a company, you're opening the risk of a court-appointed special master coming in and taking over your HR systems to enforce compliance.
You also can't terminate the licence to avoid this equitable relief:
> Additional Remedies: Termination of the License by failing to remedy harms in no way prevents Licensor or Supply Chain Impacted Party from seeking appropriate remedies at law or in equity.
It's a fascinating conceptual legal document but completely unusable. I'm not a lawyer but using anything under this licence seems incredibly risky to me.
Companies take that gift and use it to provide a service for cheaper than it would otherwise be if they had to build it all themselves.
You are already benefiting from open source - but it is a tiny benefit and subtle and very indirect and very diffuse.
Licensing is thorny but it’s personal choice too.. would you use a project whose license is “use it for now unless or until I decide you’re evil at my discretion”.. probably not. Probably, someone else would get the users you have now, and the corresponding popularity.
It is a tough choice, but it’s a lovely and important thing you’re doing when you provide the gift of open source software.
Isn't that kind of always the bargain we're making? We can use someone's work as long as they're willing to let us, but if they change the license, we might not be able to continue using it.
With [A]GPL it's only possible if there are no external contributions or everyone agree. Again, you are free to fork the last free version.
The "no evil" goal is commendable but impossible.
Point the author makes is precisely that they don't want to do free software, and they'd like to convince you not to do free software
It seems like the author of the post is just potentially having a change of mind from one side to the other, which barely even seems noteworthy.
Clearly this sparked enough discussion and upvotes to make it to the front page of Hacker News, so people found it valuable.
To be honest, I don't think the space between GPL/MIT and commercial closed source is explored enough. I'm aware there's a few examples of things in between, but they are not common knowledge and they don't satisfy everyone. It is not a space that is easy to search online for established wisdom and comparisons in.
Sure, but they are not suggesting any practical alternative by issuing a license that essentially boils down to "Please don't use this if you are evil".
Saying that the author has an almost childlike understanding of what the word "evil" means is something of a slur against actual children - I've got a 6 year old who understands subjective morals better than this author does.
MIT: free for anyone, do whatever you want
GPL: free if you also make your software free
AGPL: GPL but SaaS can't circumvent the requirement to make your software free
I see why principled open source proponents would select GPL or AGPL. They don't just want their code to be used freely by others, they also believe more software should be free and using GPL helps with that.
GPL restrictions don't make software under the GPL not "free" as in freedom. Just a different philosophy.
FWIW I have the same quarrel with people who talk about a country being "free". To my mind, a truly free country would have no laws. It would be a horrible place, because the restrictions that laws place on us tend to make things better for everyone (we may disagree on this law or that law, but some laws, like "Don't kill someone without a very good reason", would have >99% popular support anywhere in the world).
"More free" does not necessarily imply "better"; it could be better or worse. I'd like to shift usage of the words "free" and "freedom" in this direction, but think it's probably a lost cause as the words are too emotionally charged with connotations of "good".
MIT: freedom for devs
GPL: freedom for users
AGPL: freedom for SaaS users
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmhYHzJpkuo
And if you want to read about open source vs source available, this GitHub with the Red Hat lawyer and co-author of GPLv2 provides a TLDR of the sentiment. The reference from Chad gives a deep dive into the discussion and origin of FSL’s language.
Might want to elaborate while you're on the front page!
The thing that confounds me is, this person thinks that what ICE is doing is illegal, so why does he think ICE would suddenly care about the law when it comes to software licenses?
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
We picked the Boost license for the D Language Foundation because it is the closest to public domain we could find.
Besides, why would "bad guys" be deterred by a license, anyway?
I like you @WalterBright you can use any of my stuff even if you get acquired
"For my friends everything, for my enemies the law" software license.
I can't imagine that it wouldn't be. If a company has explicit written permission from the copyright owner granting permission to use that copyright, then they can use it.
Also, it wouldn't be a special license. If you wanted to do a "For my friends everything, for my enemies the law" thing, you'd just set it as all rights reserved and add special note encouraging people to ask for permission to use it.
Plus, copyright enforcement typically goes in the other direction. It's not about who you can sue, it's about who you can't. Licenses are just a way of specifying who you cannot sue. If you want everybody to use your project but don't want to bother with a license, you can make it all rights reserved (the legal default) and just not sue anybody. You could sue them if you wanted to (which is why nobody would ever use your code: because of the risk that you change your mind and sue them), but nobody is forcing you to.
The reason they invented the standard licences is to avoid this cost and effort. Do you really want to write a 200 page legal contract for every user for software you’re giving away for free?
It would be neat to have this licese codified (Like we have MIT, GPL, etc), with the proper incentives to "ask for open source access, if I lile you, you might get it". And, of course, a "contract" that gave licensees the open source benefits.
Or a hybrid, sell them, but refuse to sell to certain entities and discount up to 100% to others based on how much you like them.
There's not a whole lot of point to acquiring Boost licensed software. Of course, they could always acquire me and pay me handsomely!
For example, automobiles cannot be made by artisans for anyone but the wealthy.
I imagine because we're talking about a subcategory of "bad guys" who still like to stay within the confines of the law (supposedly at least).
Acquisitions already come with a giant laundry list of IT work to bring things into compliance with internal policies and maybe contractual requirements and such.
Would one more thing that has to be done sooner rather than later really make that much difference?
DuckStation (PS1 emulator) changed license from GPL to CC-BY-NC, because Chinese manufacturers were including it in their hw devices. Somehow I doubt that helped.
Some possibilities (while still being FOSS) might be:
- Use AGPL3 license, and do not make exceptions. (Alternatively, make an exception but make it possible to revoke the exception.)
- Design the program for uses that are not bad so that bad uses might be more difficult.
- Sue them, if this becomes necessary.
These combination might make it difficult for bad guys to use it for bad purposes, although some organizations might ignore the license and use it anyways, but you cannot really prevent that.
Ultimately though, if you put a non free license on your libraries, somebody will cry foul, fork it, and evil will still happen.
Just because you can fork something doesn't always mean you're able to just change the license.
Basically you end up with something not legally enforceable. And will someone actually doing evil care about your license?
Best cure is to use GPL, any evil company would not be able to handle *having* to give back anything to project they used /s
(W3C standards, for example, require "multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path". https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/ )
OP's rant is about Helmet.js, his sorta-popular NPM package. You drew a fascinating parallel.
The rights are for the USER and he may use it for any purpose.
The responsibility comes with redistribution - you must pass the source code and along any modifications you have made - passing on the rights you received.
basically any restriction on the use makes it not free software.
So what can you do?
Learn how to set boundaries. If a corporation demands something that you have no interest in providing, tell them no. If you are interested in providing it, request compensation for the work or request they submit a patch or let them wait until you can do the work on your terms.
For honest leechers, choose a license that discourages them. Switching from a MIT style license to a GPL style license won't prevent people from profiting from your work, but it will discourage those who want to make proprietary extensions to your work. Also realize that this won't stop dishonest leechers.
Continue to voice your concerns. Corporations don't feel guilt, but people inside them may. Even if the people within them don't feel guilt, they may still see you as an unreliable developer to exploit.
I don't actually recommend using this specific license yet, because the text from bdsmovement.net is not technically available under a permissive license (they told me I could use it... but I don't think the person fielding my request really understood what I was asking), but perhaps you can make something similar out of your preferred permissive software license (this is a no-go with GPL unfortunately because any derived license would be incompatible with GPL in addition to permissive-licensed software)
If you're a fan of BDS you can also just list the priority targets in your license, or give the BDS organizers another nudge via email.
I think the power of this is that such licenses wouldn't change how people might use the software. And big corps like Google, Amazon, et al may accidentally end up using such software (which is perfectly allowable via the license), but would then have to circulate a license which calls for their boycott and highlights their complicity in oppression. So I think it'd be fun if some software using this license makes its way into an end-user product of theirs
Short of engaging in equally authoritarian control-freakery? I don't see how.
I'm amused by one package author that I'll leave unnamed who has a list on his site enumerating political parties around the world at one end of the political spectrum and announcing that supporters of these parties are disinvited to use his work.
I'm all: "Dude, get over yourself. Parties ALL suck. Now, do good, and consider investing less time on posturing."
Releasing it in the year 2025 is a pretty good guarantee of this, unless someone develops a time machine.
Thankfully history doesn’t repeat itself.
Sorry for getting snarky.
I happen to think that the Founders had a (generally) better set of ideas in 1787, and that those ideas are being replaced by ersatz slogans.
How the founders relate to adolf is beyond me. OTOH some would argue adolf was being patriotic (mostly these are on the conservative side of life), others say he was a nationalist (these tend to be left spinning), i just say adolf was an evil human being.
If you just want to send a message, then you can change the license and not take any further action.
2. quit using permissive licenses if you expect corporations to "give back", Open Source != Free/Libre software. You seem interested in the latter, licenses/copyright laws matter to the !bad guys.
https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...
The "big corporations" will shrug and throw a few more tens of thousands into their R&D budget and will assign a few devs to create an alternative, and when they release it as open-source, they'll use it an opportunity to self-promote, it'll have a slick website, and "X by Big Corp" will become the go-to library.
The "bad guys" will just shrug and steal your code. Al Capone was brought down on tax evasion but I don't think you're going to get him on copyright infringement.
If you can somehow convince the majority of non-corporate developers to not use corporate-sponsored open-source, then that might be interesting, but not by much, because there aren't many of those.
Ben Thompson and James Allworth discussed an idea on an episode of The Exponent (https://exponent.fm/) the idea of a "principle stack", and at which "layer" of the stack it's appropriate to address different societal issues. I wish I could find the episode again, it was quite a few years ago. The upshot being... maybe software licensing isn't the right place to address e.g. income inequality?
On the other hand, I definitely encourage tech workers (and all workers) to think about their place in the world and whether their work aligns with their personal values. I think the existence of free and open source software is a fantastic thing, but I think we should continue to evaluate whether it is in danger, or whether it could be better, or whether our efforts might be applied to something else.
For example, I'd love to see co-ops developing shared-source infrastructure based on principles of mutuality, which the sector is built upon anyway. The co-op principles already include cooperative and communitarian ideas which mesh really well with some aspects of open-source software development. But co-ops aren't about just giving everything away either. There could be a real new approach to building a software commons for mutual businesses, rather than a kind of freedom-washed way for big tech companies to benefit from free labour.
I'm biased but I think the model of member-service co-ops (like Ace Hardware) providing tailored software services to particular industries is fertile ground. Free of VC incentives, reasonably profitable, aligned incentives, and the state of software tooling makes this doable.
And since this model doesn't require capturing as much value as a VC funded venture, it's more sustainable.
But the hard thing is figuring out how to get to decent product without upfront investment, in lieu of investment models that don't require outsize returns.
I can think of ways to create early capital but I've yet to see an industry think through how to fund smart suppliers without falling into the trap of thinking they need to be VCs.
And they let us bulk buy for our member publishers.
There's so much potential in what you are suggesting!
Yeah, this is the hard part.
I work in the small “ERP-like” business market and I’ve come up with some good ideas (based on the reaction of the people I talk to). But the problem is that even a small team of about five genuinely solid developers can cost around US $300,000–500,000 per year — and that’s even factoring in that I’m in LATAM!.
That’s a lot.
To make something like this happen, you need to convince fairly big players — the ones who have the capital and the patience, but more importantly the vision. And that’s the part that’s rare. At least in theory, that’s what VCs are supposed to bring.
(This is the stage I’m at currently.)
For example, what if the dominance of co-ops in Nigeria is a contributor to economic stagnation? Do co-ops still count as "virtuous" if they're keeping a nation impoverished? Testing that hypothesis would be highly nontrivial, econometrics is hard.
Trying to license your software so as to reduce income inequality seems too ambitious. Licensing your software so it can e.g. be used by cleantech companies but not fossil fuel companies seems way more feasible by comparison.
It seems like you might've moved the goalpost a bit...
At the end of the day: any entity that works for the public good (be it a co-op, a non-profit or a state owned enterprise[1]) would be a better recipient of the free labour provided by f/oss hobbyists, than a for-profit multinational... And often economic performance is equivocated with financial performance. At the end of the day, if everyone can put food on the table[2] (here and in the developing world), I couldn't care less if some GDP metric might imply that "there's stagnation actually"
[1] My point being, that a SOE will have more bargainining power than a small co-op, and thus be able to fight unequal exchange and compensate for income inequality
[2] "food on the table" is a proxy for: food itself, shelter, healthcare, affordable heating (or cooling) and consumer goods and services (tech gadgets to learn and keep in touch with family, long distance transport to visit relatives, etc.)
One problem with trying to restrict the availability of open-source software: In the limit, as LLMs become better and better at writing code, the value of open-source software will go to zero. So trying to restrict the availability of your code is skating away from where the puck is going. Perhaps your efforts to improve the world are better allocated elsewhere.
LLM's are the least ethically sourced pieces of technology I've ever seen. That they have businesses built that haven't been sued out of existence for not asking for permission to train first is positively mind boggling.
LLMs aren't usually trained on large proprietary codebases like the ones from Google, Microsoft or Apple?
A weapon that only a lawful good character can wield is the stuff of fairy tales and board games, which do not reflect reality fully enough.
Unlike this, freedom is pretty well-defined, so e.g. GPL is upheld by courts.
It's all context and timing.
Almost everyone that will attack this idea will present actions that are loaded with context - murder, is killing when it's bad, self defence is killing when it's good.
If you look at everything, and look at it's non-contextual action, then you can easily find contextually 'good' and contextually 'bad' instances of that thing.
Even further, the story of the man who lost his horse [0] shows us that even if we say that something that happens is contextually good, or bad, the resulting timeline could actually be the complete opposite, meaning that, ultimately, we can never really know if something is good, or bad.
[0] https://oneearthsangha.org/articles/the-old-man-who-lost-his...
What I am hearing is if you remove context (and timing, lets say it is part of context) then there is no good or bad. But who said to remove context? Arent we saying then there is good and bad depending on context?
Many people, including myself, would agree in the abstract, while at the same time some situations being very clear once down to a real example.
It reminds me of people claiming pain is an illusion or facts not existing (very edgy), until someone slaps them in the face to prove "I did slap you, that is a fact". I think that is reality, and specific examples are easier.
P.S. I would add values into the context.
If you need to evaluate all the context to know whether a license is usable, it makes it extremely hard for “good guys” to use code under that license. (It’s generally very easy for “bad guys” to just use it quietly.)
It is not a computer program, but a an ethics problem. We can solve it by thinking of the context and the ethics of it.
I realize it is the topic of this thread, but OP did not mention anything in relation to licenses, and was just talking about good and bad not existing objectively (without context).
I think, if we came with a specific situation, most people with similar values might reach the same good/bad verdict, and a small minority might reach a different one.
I believe the Tyson Foods example is overly simplistic and still too abstract, because one can be vegetarian for many reasons, and these would affect the "verdict". In the real world, if we were working on that piece of software the question would be: Does the implementation of this specific hr SAP module for Tyson foods by me, a vegetarian against animals suffering unnecessarily, etc. as opposed as the abstract idea of any piece of code and any vegetarian. If a friend called you: I have this situation at work, they are asking me to write software to do x and I feel bad about it, etc. etc. I bet it would not be difficult to know what is right and wrong. Another aspect of it is, we could agree something is wrong (bad) and you might still do it. That does not mean there is no objective reality, just that you might not have options or that your values might not be the ones you think (or say) they are, for example.
I believe that this would effectively make sure that nobody uses these licenses.
All you doing is agreeing how the context of the situation is determining if the action is "good" or "bad" (which was my point)
This was one of the many disagreements between Catholics and Protestants during the 16th-17th century, for instance, with some of the most powerful Catholic currents (e.g. Jesuits) being very much in favor of rethinking morality to take into account context, while the most powerful Protestant currents pushed for taking morality back to [their interpretation of] the manichean early Christian dogmas.
What a bold claim.
For JSLint, Crockford gave an exemption though: "I give permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."
https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38...
One could come up with clauses that could be admissible at court, e.g. "this software is expressly not licensed to be used for anything intended to kill humans". It would not be licensed for military planning software, but would likely be still licensed for a military transport system, or even an anti-drone weapon.
The best actionable clause I could come up with is like so: "your license to use this software for any purpose terminates as soon as a court of [insert jurisdiction] finds that it has been used for [something you are opposed to, but also sufficiently clearly defined, like genocide, or incarceration of peaceful political dissidents], which has resulted from the use of your products and services, and with your prior knowledge of such use". I think I've even saw similar clauses in many commercial licenses, just with not morals-related provisions.
https://exponent.fm/episode-168-a-community-of-loonies/
But I'm sure I remember an episode where they discuss Matthew Prince and some neo-nazi site.
The "principle stack" is a separate concept which I haven't yet found.
You're still free to license it out commercially on other terms, the open-source community gets to make use of it as they please, and it ensures you're credited.
Uhm... I wouldn't be so sure. Looks to me like such a license carries transitively to projects that depend on your software.
Suppose you're distributing a library on such terms. Then an open source project uses your library. Such a project can't then be used in a commercial fashion unless whoever distributes it gets a commercial license from the library's copyright owner. Now suppose the project uses multiple libraries with such terms. That's a burden.
Then again this may be a feature, not a bug, of the model you're proposing.
I suppose that it wouldn't work in practice, though. The AGPL license (and libraries with a GPL license instead of a LGPL one) aren't really widespread, probably because of the virality clause.
A possible alternative would be using a standard licence like MIT but putting swears/slurs in either the author list or the code itself so using it would be a PR risk, and this could work as a deterrent against commercial usage.
Good luck. Defining evil objectively is, of course, a challenge. But even with an unambiguous definition in hand, enforcing or detecting it is nigh impossible. Especially since the truly evil will simply lie, ignore the terms of your license, and use it anyway.
Who cares. The end result of this is that we all get to use amazing software, often for free.
Think of your open source contributions as a gift to all of humanity. I wouldn't get too hung up on the fact that bad people can use it. Hammer makers don't add conditions on who can buy their products, even if it could be used as a murder weapon. Take solace in the fact that your work is creating far more good than evil.
You're increasing the rate of innovation in the world. And we're all grateful for it.
[1]: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/
"Evil" is also a bad descriptor to use. If I started giving out apples for free on the street (of which I had an infinite supply), I wouldn't be upset if nobody came back with an improved apple for me to use instead.
> I don’t just want to do this for my little project; I want to slowly change the discourse. I’m not sure how to do that effectively, if it’s even possible.
So he's decided that as the supreme arbiter of what is good and just that he'll be trying to slowly boil open source's collective frogs. How narcissistic.
> How can I bring more attention to this issue given the relative popularity of my project? Do I write a blog post? A callout in the documentation?
No. Because it doesn't matter.
It goes both ways. Open-source devs don't owe you free bug patches. People profitting from open-source don't owe you a share of their income.
Since organizations evolve over time, you could have a re-authorization flow every time your users want a major version update of your software.
A flaw in this proposal is that the very worst actors (scammers, black hats, etc.) are likely to be beyond the reach of the legal system in practice. Perhaps you could mitigate this a little bit by replacing Github Issues with a private support forum for trusted licensees.
Many people in the software industry are looking for new licensing models that take these systemic issues into account. It’s the ecosystem evolving to address current conditions. This should be expected and welcomed, but instead the idea is consistently written off by folks who would rather live by the old rules. The commons continues to suffer for it.
And the point should be ignored even more. Free software is a fairly specific thing, trying to co-opt it into something it isn't makes you the bad actor
Make your own idea instead of stealing and leeching off the success of others. Thats frankly disrespectful to even have the gall to do this. You definitely don't deserve ruining another's image for your idea of how society should work.
> I know my goal: shift the default in open source from “it’s free for anyone to use” to “please don’t use this if you’re evil”. I don’t just want to do this for my little project; I want to slowly change the discourse. I’m not sure how to do that effectively, if it’s even possible.
> I remain unconvinced at the societal value of “freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose”, often called freedom 0. I don’t want to donate my work to the bad guys!
They never use the term “free software” to describe their goals. To the extent they use the term “open source” it’s in the lowercase informal form. How else should they describe their ideas if not using this terminology?
I'm very grateful for all this free software, but if a maintainer doesn't think what they are doing is sustainable then they need to stop doing it. That isn't much of a revelation. And if people want to release software that can only be used by people on their ideological wavelength then they can do that, but:
- The projects are probably not going to find much popularity.
- In many ways it is a remarkably entitled position; after all my dishwashing machine doesn't test my moral purity before cleaning my dishes. Why should my software?
- Any ideology that centres on identifying "the bad guys" is too naive to hold a community together without becoming unbelievably corrupt and an insult to whatever ideals the original believers had.
I have had several projects where I didn't want to be forked, especially by a company with a marketing budget. I choose not to distribute it with an open source license. There's nothing wrong with that. Companies have sold copies of source to people who paid, so that's an option. But I don't know of any licenses like that which have been written for the public to use (copying a company license is a copyright violation)
That would create a market for creating your own set of fact CVEs (using AI of course) everytime the rent came due.
At least that's how the community generally reacts.
Offer a dual license model if needed. People may fork, but I'd say its still worth it.
Something like the creative commons license just for evil.
I like to use non enforceable license such as “don’t do evil” license because it causes meltdowns in the legal departments of large tech companies trying to define what is evil and whether they are committing evil.
Even if its not enforceable, at least it can trigger some kind of a reflection in folks and their interactions with society that supports their existence.
Can corn farmers use it?
Can it be used in a factory that makes anti-mosquito nets?
Many licenses are used incorrectly or aren't abided by simply because the rights holder does not have the financial means to sue. Why should that be different here.
If the author wants to abandon libre/free/open source licenses, they should state so explicitly. As it stands, the blog post is ambiguous about whether the author wants to abandon libre/free/open source for a proprietary license or whether they want to strip libre/free/open source licenses of their freedom. I don't follow alternative licenses of this sort but I've seen licenses that allow gratis use up until some threshold of users or income is reached. For example, the Unreal engine license has something along these lines [1].
If the author wants to remain libre/free/open source while mitigating bad behavior by large corporate actors, the AGPL is a fine choice as it legally coerces the copyleft even behind network based software. I'm not sure I have any hard evidence but I've heard that large corporate actors avoid the AGPL for this reason.
I'm a little incredulous that authors choose one of the most "business friendly" but least libre/free/open source (while still being FOSS) licenses and then are shocked when businesses use it without any thought to remuneration. I've seen a few instances of people providing software under and MIT license, such as the helmet.js package discussed in this blog post, and then regretting their decision.
The MIT license is used as a "business friendly" license that is still libre/free/open but doesn't have the copyleft clause to mitigate bad behavior. Why did you choose the MIT license in the first place? Why abandon other libre/free/open source license alternatives and go straight to a proprietary solution?
I don't even know how to begin to address the issue of who gets to decide who the "bad guys" are and who the "good guys" are.
In my opinion, the reason for the success of FOSS is because it's an answer to overly restrictive copyright by enriching the commons. The commons, by definition, is free for public use. If you don't agree with creating a rich commons so that everyone can benefit, that's absolutely your right, just please don't call it open source.
Because if what this guy is saying is reasonable, then it immediately follows that it's also reasonable for every ideology and religion to exclude the ones they don't like. For example: how does an antisimetic software license strike you? Because that would be a perfectly reasonable license for some people to enact, and fully justified by this article's logic.
Do unto others, and all that.
Just like anti democratic values are relevant for democracies.
Don't straw man this.
> Overall, these ideas lead me to believe that the open source movement needs to see itself as in a larger social context. Can we shift the balance of power away from massive companies and their massive harms? Can we prevent Nazis from using our software? Should we even try?
> I know my goal: shift the default in open source from “it’s free for anyone to use” to “please don’t use this if you’re evil”. I don’t just want to do this for my little project; I want to slowly change the discourse. I’m not sure how to do that effectively, if it’s even possible.
I read it as a more "big corps exploiting open source devs" take (as were six out of seven bullet points), but they did indeed slip that in, and concluded with it even.
The article is an interesting philosophical situation where you know the intent is good. But maybe, they took it too far without any of the necessary caveats.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/open-source-devs-reverse-dec...
That aside, even if something like this was “legally enforceable”, it adds enough friction, risk, and uncertainty to downstream consumers compared to a “vanilla” open source license that I expect most folks would choose an alternative to the “bespoke” license project where they could. Fine if you don’t care about getting usage, but that defeats much of the value that open source brings.
Take at any conflict in the world. Ok, nothing that China or Russia are involved in. IDK, let's keep it complicated and say, "waring factions in some African country that doesn't regularly make the news", or "skirmishing Muslim groups in the middle east" (So a hard no to Israel/Palestine which everybody has strongly polarised opinions about whether they're right or not).
Now, wait for every other npm package in the world to get polarised on whether or not to block your shitty package because you picked the wrong side in some faraway war that, to be honest, you don't give a shit about anyway. Or maybe you didn't even voice an opinion about said war? WHY DIDN'T YOU? WHAT ARE YOUR HIDING? WEAR THE RIBBON! CHANT THE CHANT!
Because that's all some people seem to have time for these days, and it's practically impossible to avoid the purity spiral if you show up on their radar. I've seen well known people (celebrities, academics, billionaires) get cancelled for not supporting some specific thing. Once you make this part of your software license people will rightly run like fuck from it.
What's your stance on:
- veganism
- India / Pakistan
- Climate change (no fly stickers, do you fly??)
- GM
- You country's immigration policy
- Some other country's immigration policy
- Trump (even if you're not American)
- Taiwan
- Taxation
- Houtis
- Sulki racing (Irish travellers)
- Islam Vs Christianity / Judaism / Hinduism
- Communism / Socialism
Or, just maybe, this is a few lines of code that is concerned with X and not (all these things, Jesus give me a break)
The end result of this would be a completely broken ecosystem. Package version hell, but worse.
The benefits are dispersed broadly while the “evil” appears to be more concentrated and easier to identify.
Don’t lose sight of the benefits.
(PS We contribute to projects and individuals.)
People can reasonably agree on what "Open Source" means. Once you start trying to define "bad guys" and exclude them, you will get dozens of incompatible definitions and no consensus, and as a result, you'll have numerous incompatible ecosystems rather than one.
"Open Source" isn't perfect, not by any means. But any purported replacement for it has to be so obviously better that people are willing to switch and build consensus on the replacement.
Creating such license will indeed discourage lawful corporations from making use of it because of the legal uncertainty.
It will discourage open source projects for making use of it because it's not open source and it's incompatible either from a legal or philosophical standpoint.
The only ones who would not discourage would be the ones you actually want to prevent using it since they would likely not care about the license terms at all and just use it regardless.
The end result would be essentially a dead project that would be either ignored by the programmer community if it started out with this license or be forked like what happened when other open source projects switched licenses example redis being replaced by valkey.
May I add: You’d have to stop using VsCode or TypeScript, or even npm and Chrome, if you think big means bad, and you don’t want to fuel big corporations.
One can see how rediculous the whole idea of limiting FOSS in a “who can use this” way is.
Truly free will always win in the long way. Or you don’t think, a paid dev with some AI can replace your package fairly quickly?
Suppose your libpopular forbids ill-faith actors from using it. Also suppose that I wrote a my-utility, a neutral tool, that depends on libpopular. If some bad actor uses my-utility for wrongdoing, will I be responsible for their behavior? Will my-utility be in breach of your license?
I think of the case of the Russian programmer who was arrested and jailed for stealing proprietary code from Goldman Sachs. During the trial it was revealed that Goldman Sachs would use open source software and replace the software licence with their own:
"Open source was an idea that depended on collaboration and sharing, and Serge had a long history of contributing to it. He didn’t fully understand how Goldman could think it was O.K. to benefit so greatly from the work of others and then behave so selfishly toward them. “You don’t create intellectual property,” he said. “You create a program that does something.” But from then on, on instructions from Schlesinger, he treated everything on Goldman Sachs’s servers, even if it had just been transferred there from open source, as Goldman Sachs’s property. (At Serge’s trial Kevin Marino, his lawyer, flashed two pages of computer code: the original, with its open-source license on top, and a replica, with the open-source license stripped off and replaced by the Goldman Sachs license.)"
From: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma...
> ‘If you tell me everything, I’ll talk to the judge, and he’ll go easy on you.’
Reminder: That's a lie. Shut up and ask for your lawyer.
It's pretty shocking.
For this author's definition of "bad guys" (megacorps), AGPL is probably the easiest poison pill. As with all poison pills, this will also make many (most?) "good" users unable to use it.
This project is no curl or database engine, it seems to be a slightly easier way to set HTTP response headers. I bet most of the uses are transitive (someone using something that uses something that uses a framework that uses something that uses this project).
In particular, this project is something small enough that nobody will pay for it, not because it's not worth it, but because the friction of paying for it is higher than rewriting it from scratch. And "the bad guys" are unlikely to use it directly in their major products due to the pure nature of it.
In most cases, but especially this one IMO, you just get to choose wheter to contribute to the commons, the actual commons, for everyone, including "the bad guys" - or not.
Make a new standard license similar to the GPL, but one that includes machine-readable payment requirements, each consisting of:
- a UUID
- a minimum profit threshold
- a license fee, either a fixed amount or some well-defined formula (you'd probably want an inflation adjustment system)
- a recipient
Anyone who wants to use the software can do it, but if you cross the profit threshold, you have to pay, once per project. Dependents would naturally inherit the payment requirements of their dependencies, but you'd only pay once per dependency even if it was used in multiple projects (hence the UUID).
With high enough profit thresholds and small payments, this should avoid the license from becoming toxic:
* If you aren't a megacorp, you don't care because you're not hitting the thresholds.
* If you aren't a megacorp but dreaming of becoming one, you still don't care, because if you do become one, you can afford the cost, and the combined cost (payments + compliance cost) is well understood and limited.
* If you are a megacorp, you still don't care, because we're most likely talking about peanuts and the machine readable descriptions make it practical to comply, and you get a "software bill of materials" out of it as a side effect.
This relies on the minimum profit thresholds being high enough and the license fees low enough. This could be achieved by the text of the license itself being licensed only as long as you keep within certain thresholds.
Building a new license ecosystem and the critical mass behind it is a tall order, but I think this way it's not hopeless-from-the-start. The design isn't meant to "capture a fair share of the value" or anything like that, it's meant to be minimally toxic (because that's a hard requirement for having a chance of becoming popular) while still delivering some minimal contribution to big projects with a lot of dependents.
I was originally planning to suggest a revenue threshold, but I think profit is better, as it excludes nonprofits, startups in the starting-up phase, companies that aren't money printers, etc.
It's incompatible with 1 definition of free software. More and more developers are unhappy with this definition.
The ceos that want to market their software as open source are ಥ ‿ ಥ
I was pointing out that devs are perfectly fine with the official definition of free software - and the only ones wanting to extend it further are people that wish to incorrectly label their software as open source - which usually are CEOs of companies which want to portrait their closed software as open for marketing reasons.
IANAL, but I think your cited example would not fall under the open source label either. And all devs I know would prefer the definition of the term to be kept as is, making it not open source.
The term that doesn't make any claims about whether a piece of software respects user freedoms is source-available, which these "everyone except the bad guys" licenses are commonly categorized as.
Open source is like free speech. We are never going to control what people can say (as in who uses the sodtware and for what purpose). But we are happy that it exists.
If you’re not charging for it then who cares? I’d rather have people actually using it than have a super restrictive licence and an empty project.
"Open".
They would then be breaking the license terms without realizing.
Is there anything in npm to protect against this? Projects have hundreds of dependencies, it's not feasible to manually check licenses haven't changed every time you update.
If the project is even slightly useful, but with a restrictive license, someone else will create an alternative with a free license. The community will quickly move, and the time spent trying to push a political opinion will be wasted.
In the long term, a free software license is always going to win. Even when it's unsustainable for one maintainer, the software remains free, and if it's useful enough, others will take on the maintainer role.
For sustainability, that's going to be a mix of lobbying your government, and companies realizing they need to hire developers because the open source maintainers aren't able to do everything for free. Just realize that governments are slow with conflicting goals. And companies will minimize their costs, leaving the average open source maintainer at the edge of being sustainable.
This guy is free to select whatever license it wants for his code. But don't expect profiting from the open source (in the common sense of free software) brand if you don't want to respect it's principes.
Would the package be as successful? Have has many users, contributors, ... The author is free to test that if he wants but his rant isnot justified for the whole open source world.
Also, I'm quite sure that he is also a freeloader happy to benefit without contributing. Even from big companies. I'm quite sure that he never paid or contributed for npm, GitHub or his IDE for example...
> The funniest thing is when Cuck Licensers complain that people are abiding by their licenses. They will complain that people took their code and made money off of it. They will complain when they don't get some social credit they feel like they deserve when their code is used in a project. They will complain if people fork their project and it becomes more popular than the original. They will complain when some tech giant takes their code and makes spyware out of it.
None of these things are prevented by making your code GPL. GPL only means that if they distribute the software, they also have to distribute the source. There is no requirement to provide “social capital”, to not make money or to not put spyware in it.
> With Cuck Licenses, you get the worst of two worlds: You get no credit for your work, […]
BSD-style licenses require attribution when distributing the software. So if Intel distributed MINIX, they had to put the license and Andrew Tanenbaum’s copyright notice somewhere in their documentation. That’s why we get all those screenshots of curl being in things.
1) make useless software
2) go closed source
3) ?
Also, why does nobody say “oh wow, if other people hadn’t generously given time like this i would have to pay so much more for everything because everything companies do would cost more?”
This lens of viewing corporate give back to projects in direct $ or donated developer time is mildly useful for understanding the ecosystem as a whole, but grab hold of it more than lightly and it becomes a blindfold.
In general, $YOUR opinions are too flighty to be basing licensing decisions on.
There's a generally established exception for military use, which works anyhow because even if you are hypothetically perfectly morally fine with military use you may not want to permit them to use it on the grounds you haven't tested it enough. See also the perfectly well-established "not to be used on medical devices" exemption. But if you want to conditionalize your license on, say, "whether or not you're willing to sign this petition about $POLITICAL_TOPIC", that's not something anyone can build on. It'll be a terminal license in the code tree.
If this means you don't want to contribute to open source because you are unwilling to accept this... by all means! If you don't like a contract, don't sign it. Nobody's forcing you to write open source software for free. But there isn't a practical "well, what if only people I agree with are allowed to use it" option, because then even the people you agree with today really can't base any significant decisions on that sort of foundation.
(And, in general, anyone who lives, say, 25 years, and has absolutely no changes of political opinion in that time period... yeah... that's probably a bad sign. I don't hate 25-year-ago-me or anything, but I've got a lot of disagreements with him, and I don't expect 25-year-from-now-me to completely agree with me today either. Certainly not enough to write anything into a license agreement.)
Finally, as another practical manner, this license is also signing up to someday appear in some court of law to litigate the matter of whether or not some person or other does or does not agree with you on some political matter, in a situation where it will be a judge deciding that and not you, and wow am I just not being paid enough for my free contributions to open source to go through that under any circumstances.
I'm not in a position to get full time job and definitely not an entrepreneur, I'd like to collaborate on my ideas, see it grow and may be become useful. The counter-argument from my peers is that it will be just ai-copyed with slight change in variable naming.
Can we prevent Marxist–Leninist–Maoists from using our software? Should we even try?
elmerfud•2mo ago