I think the Open Source Initiative definition is horribly dated. Right now as an open source community we don't have the tools to make sure our technology isn't used by fascists.

Coraline Ada Ehmke

  • mayo_cider [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Just use WTFPL, corporate lawyers hate licenses that aren't made of legal jargon so if they want to use your code, they have to copy and paste it uncredited like the rest of us.

    On a more serious note, this is unfortunately an innate problem of developing any new technologies and tools. If you create something that can be used in an unethical way, sooner or later someone will do it. Unfortunately people who want to do unethical things don't really care if they break some ethics clause in your license.

    • Galli [comrade/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      That license grants corporations the ability to completely appropriate your software, it's just too obscure for anything of value to them to be licensed with it.

      Corporations actually do hate the GPL enough that they founded the OSI to curtail it and google has written their own compilers and kernel to abandon linux in android to avoid it.

    • CoconutOctopus [it/its]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I myself prefer the FAFOL v0.2 or higher.

      I'm really in line with the idea of the Ethical Source movement – I really hate the way Open Source has become a way for big tech corporations to extract free labor rather than to create viable nonprofit alternatives – but I'm also in the camp that says source licenses are probably not the way to achieve that. I don't actually know a better way, though.

      • mayo_cider [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Yeah, licenses work only if you have the resources to enforce them. Global unionization is the most obvious end goal, but we should try to figure other ways to prevent this before we reach that stage. Right now I don't really know what else to do other than have some kind of ethics clause in the license hoping that it scares the corporations away and staying far away from facial recognition etc. technologies.