I’ve been thinking lately that if we don’t want to work on the databases that extremist governments use to detain immigrants they have separated from their children, or on the operating systems that well-equipped militaries used to rain autonomous death from above, or the image processing tools used by mass surveillance networks, then we need to stop dishing out the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
That also means discriminating against fields of endeavour, so such software would not only not be Free Software but not even Open Source. I’m OK with that, if it also means that it’s not used for purposes I don’t want to support. I still think Free Software is better than closed proprietary software, but have come to believe that Free Software is the amoral option where what our field needs is morality.
I don’t know what this would look like. I do not believe it would look like The JSON Licence, which is open to misinterpretation (intentional or otherwise). I think it would have to be a licence that enabled studying, sharing and modification of the software, but that explicitly forbade any use for any purpose that isn’t studying, modifying or sharing. With a “contact me or my agent, tell us what you’re doing, and we’ll decide whether to grant you an additional licence for use” suffix. This is more open than closed proprietary software, but no more available for deployment to bad actors.
Yes, that can be abused, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.
In The Very Bad Old Days I worked for a government that did Bad, but in a department that did a Lot of Good.
Various sanctions made it very hard to use technology to do Good, and imposed all kinds of hoops to jump through.
I knew people in The department that did A Lot Of Very Bad.
They had no trouble getting and using tech.
They were Bad People who paid Bad People money to lie / cheat / steal.
They paid less for their tech and had to navigate fewer obstacles.
I ended up using a lot of open source software to do good, because that was all I could get.
The nasties pirated a lot of proprietary software to do bad, because basically they didn’t give a shit about anything.
Why programs must not limit the freedom to run them
by Richard Stallman
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed…
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This is a slippery-slope argument. In practice you could easily build a system out of bits that people are willing to licence to you and that nonetheless are not Free: look at all the people using proprietary software on Windows for example.
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