This is about as effective as ripping an arm off your shirt and throwing it in the vicinity of an ICE agent.
The result of that effort will be a day fielding questions from everyone but ICE about what the heck is wrong with your shirt.
The result of that effort will be a day fielding questions from everyone but ICE about what the heck is wrong with your shirt.
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/02/palantir-provides-the-en...
Now that we are both aware, let's talk about their license. Is it now a non-free license? How does it affect their current non-Palantir user base? Is it enforceable? Was it meant to be enforceable? Are there ways in which a license written by people who aren't themselves lawyers can come back to bite them?
This entire digression goes away completely if they put the relevant information nearly anywhere else. Their front page, README.md, change log, etc. Hell, they could even put it as a "did you know" comment in the body of the code.
They could do any or all of them and get just as much or more notoriety as they did by ruining their open source/free software compatible license.
I understand the motivation with wanting to protest in the best way you can, but I think in this case, it is going to do more harm than good.
For example, if they put the same information in a comment in the code, then whatever flame war might ensue would at least be fully on the social implications of it. Nobody will worry about the comment accidentally getting interpreted improperly by various JS engines. Nobody will talk about how the big company they work for will not touch code that has certain comments because the comment department advised them those comments are radioactive. Troglodytes won't pop up to poorly recite what they think they read on the wall about comments and maximizing freedom.
All of that and more will happen when you write anything non-standard in a license for a FLOSS project. It's a dog-whistle to every programmer out there who has dreamed of pretending to be a lawyer.
I offer into evidence the ratio of ICE-related posts to licensing-desiderata-related posts in this thread.
If you've really got so much energy to waste that your thinking about writing your own custom license blurb, just go reverse-engineer a baseband OS or something.
https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633
Someone had very decent aims-- protesting ICE-- and executed it in the wrong scope-- a license change.
If you read the comments on that issue you'll see at least one person takes that as a good lesson for avoiding the very decent aims in open source projects.
That is unfortunate, and IMO a good reason to avoid mucking around with licenses at all.