Bruce Perens: Invasion of the Ethical Licenses (2019)

The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) (and their "Social Contract" with the Free Software Community for that matter) [1] are very short documents, and I recommend anyone reading them. Created in 1997, and only slightly changed once in 2004, they are a staple of free and open source software.

[1] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

I doubt anyone using these kinds of licenses really thinks they are going to "work" from the point of view of significantly limiting that behaviour.

They do, however, act as a way to advertise the issues—this article being an example of how using a license like that causes people to publicise and maybe think about your issues.

The final suggestion in the article is working to enact better laws: starting and maintaining the conversation is the first step to doing that.

These typical naive tv-plot contracts: You write outrageous terms into a contract form and it becomes a binding under the law is both parties agree.

It seems that some people are so naive that they really think this is how the contract law works.

On a related note, Perens resigned from the OSI last week over concerns about the Cryptographic Autonomy License: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/03/osi_cofounder_resig...

I agree with Bruce, these licenses may be the results of good intentions but they are probably unenforceable, and if I may add: they are silly.

Back in the '90s we got a dev kit for a microcontroller (Toshiba if I recall) that had language in the license that specifically forbade using the thing in terrorist acts.

So I don't think this is new.

Plus I’ve heard that these make this difficult to use by “legitimate” entities too since they’re non-standard and hence require more legal scrutiny.

FLOSS is a very good cause and it attracts people with an open heart who do care about good causes. However, the goal of FLOSS is not to be a guardian of how people should live, nor should it be a judge or a police to prevent or sanction the evil in this world. There are different and better venues for this!

If I see a project adopt such a license then for me it's a sign of immaturity and not being able to manage the power that being a maintainer brings. I'd definitely try to avoid such software as it doesn't fulfil the four freedoms and thus isn't FLOSS.

These things are resume filler for people looking for jobs in the non-profit sector.

> The idea behind this was that Freedom meant Freedom for everyone, not just Freedom for people we approved of.

It's not freedom for everyone. It cannot be used by those who do not accept the license. If they do accept it, it limits their rights to use, modify and redistribute the software within limits spelled out in the license.

"You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License"

Most people here refuse to understand that "freedom" can't be given by a license. It can stay the same, or become restricted (when a license imposes a duty or obligation on the licensee).

The ethical licenses are a nonsense. Even the name is awful (how is it ethical to attempt to restrict another person's freedom?) Thankfully no project that I know or care about uses one of those.

With all due respect to the author, I don't follow the logic of many of the claims in the article.

> However, consider enforcing the Vaccine License: imagine explaining to a judge that someone consented to be injected with vaccine by using a piece of software, and that they become copyright infringers by failing to get their shots.

Lets imagine a too small child illegally entering a amusement park ride that has a minimum height requirement, and an accident happens. The park owner do not need to explain to a judge how the child agreed to inject growth hormones by entering the ride. The requirement does not specify the way of how an individual may achieve compliance, only the measurable state which compliance may be determined.

The Vaccine License is no more complicated than licenses that specific that you can't ship software to countries which the US has an export ban in regard to encryption. The export ban specific a target demographic which the software can not be sold and/or use it. The Vaccine License specific a target demographic which may not copy it, and/or use it.

The second argument brought up is that you can't sue a citizen of sovereign countries for behavior that their governments do. Again we can look at US export bans. you don't need to enforce the condition by suing people in those countries. It is generally enough that international companies has to follow the condition.

The third argument is that since none of these licenses routinely require any royalties, the likely damages by infringers would be zero. That is not how damages get calculated. Existing royalties can be used as a guideline, but the common argument is to claim damages based on "industry standard". If a infringer publish unreleased work (say a copyrighted movie before release) it also has no existing royalties, but that hasn't stopped judges from issuing rather high damages. Context matter in court cases.

The forth argument being that the term was illegal, improper or unenforceable. As someone who has been standing on that side of the fence in regard to EULAs and privacy policies I sincerely wish it was so.

That basically leaves the last argument that enforcing licenses are too costly. I fully agree. Its like shoplifting which has less than 1% clearing rate. A lot of shop owners where I live have stopped even reporting thefts because they find the time doing the phone call is most costly than its worth. This is one place where personal principles has to weight more than financial sense. If someone steal your stuff, be that in a shop or a copyright, then you file a police report. It will likely not result in anything but it is better than nothing.

The GPL is also an ethical license, and a lot of us buy into it. A lot of us might buy into some future, different license, and the resources for enforcement will come from the people who support it.

It's only the OSI license that's some kind of libertarian commons thing. The GPL comes with obligations, and people are free to avoid the GPL for that reason, or simply violate it and deal with any consequences of that. All of these arguments apply as much to the GPL as to hypothetical "don't eat meat" or "don't steal jokes" licenses.

The only possible purpose of these licenses is to act as Super Codes of Conduct, CoCs which can "kick out" people who aren't in the project by making it too difficult for them to keep using the software when one of the contributors could pull the trigger on legal action. The action doesn't have to be successful to be expensive to fight, after all; it's the old troll tactic of making the danegeld less expensive than the battle would be.

Poof. Now anyone you don't like can't even use the software, let alone fork it and go their own direction with it. Ballmer could hardly have done it better.