Last month, I asked whether Freedom Zero is such a great idea, whether it’s OK to limit the freedom to use the software for any purpose if you dislike the purpose to which you believe someone will put it. I gave the example of the Numerical Recipes licence as one that could be adapted to this situation.
In summary, the licence would say “you are free to read this code for the purposes of understanding it, to share the code, and to contribute changes to the code. Should you wish to use the code, contact me, we will go through some customer due diligence, and I will decide whether I want you as a customer”. So far, so unexciting: imagine the usual SaaS startup pricing page with two pricing levels. The “Basic” tier is free, and scales up to 0 uses. The “Custom” tier is $contact_us pricing, and scales up to $contact_us uses.
The Lerna project was briefly licensed under a different model, which took a different approach to solve the same problem. Their approach was “you all get to treat this as a free software project, except the named organisations, who don’t”.
Just to get this out of the way as many of us are techie people who enjoy picking nits: this approach doesn’t appear to solve the problem that the author was setting out to solve. Everybody else except @evil_corps get the software under the terms of the MIT licence, @evil_corps do not get to use the software at all. Now because I got it under the terms of the MIT licence, I am free to do whatever I want except blame the authors if it doesn’t work or remove the MIT licence. This means that I am free to give it or sell it to members of @evil_corps.
Lots of people disagreed with the idea that the Lerna project maintainers, or I, would seek to restrict freedom for moral/ethical reasons, because restricting freedom itself is a moral/ethical choice that is objectionable. Unfortunately, the argument that is often advanced is a bad one.
Richard Stallman’s Why programs must not limit the freedom to run them says numerous things:
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The bad actors will probably ignore your license terms anyway, so why bother? This pessimistic view could equivalently be used to argue against any commercial terms (bad actors will pirate your software anyway, so why sell it?) or even RMS’s own General Public License (bad actors will ignore the copyleft requirements anyway, so why bother?). In fact many actors voluntarily comply with the GPL without being asked, many compliance requests are resolved voluntarily on notification, GPL compliance usually starts with a polite, private request not a lawsuit or public shaming. So evidently bothering is useful.
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Using copyright to restrict usage is abuse of copyright. But so is copyleft, although as it’s a “good” abuse of copyright that RMS approves of, he’s OK with it.
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Limiting freedom is a slippery slope to not being able to build a usable combined system, because you would have to check all the licences to know whether you could do anything. RMS does not have a beard, he has a facial hair, and another facial hair, and another, and so on.
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You shouldn’t have the right to do that.
That last one is an interesting one that RMS doesn’t go into in depth, I would imagine because he considers it inalienable. He wrote Freedom Zero, of course he believes in Freedom Zero.
Brad Kuhn, on the other hand, has written about whether I should have that right, and his post is an interesting one. He uses the example of the ACLU’s defence of free speech to argue that having a simple platform and universally supporting a simple principle creates a powerful reputation from which to then build other principled arguments.
I think that argument is compelling, and it has brought me back round to wanting Freedom Zero again.
