Can you stop your open-source project from being used for evil?
You can use whatever no-evil license for your open-source project, but if you want your project to be FOSS [1], you can't. If you restrict your project from being used for evil, it'll violate the basic freedoms that proper Free licenses grant to their users.
Also, check this video by Douglas Crockford [2]. ("I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.")
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software
If you're deeply concerned about who uses your software and for what purpose they do so; "open source" isn't what you want. You want a real commercial license, even if you're not charging money. There's nothing wrong with that, and no reason to try making "open source" attempt to conform to moral stances.
I'd say that the core value that open source serves is the notion that sharing our thoughts is better than not doing so. That is enough of a stance to take. People can agree to that even in the face of differing values in other areas.
"I asked Coraline Ada Ehmke, a leader in..."
Oh good grief. This tired topic again. How'd all this nonsense do for the Node TSC and Rod Vagg?
Ehmke isn't anyone I'd trust making ethical decisions for anything. In Ehmke's own words, "the Contributor Covenant is a political document".
It has zero to do with fixing real world problems, and everything to do with using software development as a tool to advance political ideology.
And Ehmke has the audacity to lecture about ethics. Here's something unethical: weaponizing a neutral thing (software, medicine, sports) in pursuit of political power.
I sure hope not. The definition of evil is too subject to interpretation.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but throwing out freedom zero is a lovely way to get there in short order.
SQLite is public domain, but offers a blessing instead of a license:
"The author disclaims copyright to this source code. In place of a legal notice, here is a blessing:
May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give."
No, of course you can't. If nothing else, evil doesn't feel obligated to obey copyright laws. If it's open source, they can get the source, and do whatever they want. Laws? Why would they care?
I'm on the "do not call" registry. That doesn't seem to stop spammers.
For someone with difficulties to see the grays of the world (like Coraline Ehmke, the source of the article) it must be very comforting to think there might be a scenario where the answer is βyesβ.
However, by definition, open source cannot
I don't know if software can be written in a way that cannot be used for harm. There are several issues with this, among them being (1) there is always a "shadow side" (a reference to the Jungian shadow), and (2) this is a form of "Do Less Harm" paradigm, and it is problematic because morality is not universal, monolithic, or consistent. Imposing what "less harm" means on someone else, will always polarize somewhere. It's the same problem with the "Do More Good" paradigm.
I have been lately thinking of a different way of developing and funding improvements of software, by adding on top of the idea of open source of free software. That is, "community-supported software", similar to the idea of "community-supported agriculture". No one is going to get rich off of it, but it should allow developers to get their fair share (a reference to the permaculture ethical principles).
This doesn't stop software from being used in harmful ways. However, what I'm thinking is that it helps software developed in ways that are beneficial for local communities instead of being hijacked by large corporate interests in markets that are not directly connected with the community (national stock exchanges). The end-users and local community decides what is harmful or beneficial, and pool resources to maintain and expand features.
No. But you can release software code under a license that places usage-based restrictions on the code. Some may ignore it, yes. It won't be open source under the usual definitions. But it may prevent organizations you disapprove of (along with many others) from using your code. Whether is still makes sense as mostly a source-available project at that point is up to you.
Tangentially, what is the limit of what can be put into a license or contract (that remains enforceable)? Can you just put any arbitrary requirements, as long as it's not against the law?
Like, if I lease my house, but with a clause that the resident should never change their name to "Jack" in their entire life, will that be laughed out of the court?
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I don't know if it's too conspiratorial but this does seem like a sideways attack to "embrace, extend, extinguish" FOSS.
By couching it in terms of FOSS being "unethical", FOSS licenses can be whiddled away until there's either enough non-libre licenses to cause confusion or have a widely adopted alternative license that's unusable for business.
I do notice that Stack Overflow is using a Microsoft technology stack. The author of the article has been part of Microsoft Research [1].
Don't use a FOSS license.
You can still open your source, take pull requests and everything, and use a proprietary license with a clause that says the code is not to be used for evil, where you (the author) hold the sole final judgement of what constitutes evil.
Basically, copyright the shit out of your code, but selectively enforce it, and hint to the community that you are unlikely to enforce it on people who you think aren't evil.
Most people will likely steer clear of your code, except for a handful of hobbyists and maybe some academics.
Short answer: no.
Long answer: still no. you have zero control over what anyone chooses to do with your open-source project. You gave up any control you had when you released the source code to the world.
No, because not many (perhaps none at all) people have objective measures of morality. Is waterboarding torture? You say yes, I say yes, but if it's 2003 and the Iraq War is in full swing, do you think enough people are going to agree with us to mount an effective lawsuit? Maybe you can instead choose to explicitly enumerate all things you consider "evil" in the license, but that license is going to be prohibitively long.
I'm generally not a fan of paternalistic license clauses, but I dunno, I think I could get behind an open source license clause that prohibited click-through user agreements.
In my opinion, they are a complete nuisance with no upside. Nobody is reading them and I doubt they are even enforceable. From what I can tell, they are nothing but economic drag introduced by the corporate lawyers.
Whoever originally invented the wheel ultimately is responsible for all weapons of war.
once the cat is out of the bag, it's not going back.
This smells like someone inventing a moral dilemma because the FUD didn't work on the users to make them stop using open source, so they're gonna try to get the developers to stop making it.
To further riff on this could your license prevent evil outcomes regardless of whether the original intent?
This article makes the mistake of conflating open source and free software. Open source software may be distributed under licenses that prohibit use by orgs/industries that the developer finds unsavory. But the resulting software is proprietary - not FOSS.
You could develop SkyNet and have it invade every computer on the world to monitor usage. It still leaves many problems like codifying the definition of evil, airgapped systems, detectability and how evil would you consider invading everyone to be.
As a society, we have laws for this kind of thing. If you want to ban something, go to the legislature and ban it. Abusing our position as creators to illiberally force our own personal "ethics" on others is nothing but petty tyranny.
Interesting article timing since github just removed the Tornado Cash project as well as all of the developers accounts from the site. I guess github doesn't think open-source code that can be used for evil should be allowed to stay up.
Once your intellectual work is out there in the open, it is no longer yours. It is effectively public domain, regardless of the license -- because the license assumes that the user actually cares about it, and that it is actually enforceable. But there are a variety of scenarios where this is not true.
This applies to any IP. Remember: sharing is caring
let's ask the developers of the open-source deepfake program what they think is an ethical use of their tool.
Yes. OSI's ridiculous and unsuccessful attempts to legally own the phrase "open source" not withstanding.
When considering license measures for this purpose, remember that evil people don't care about software licenses or copyright. So if your license inconveniences good people to "hurt" evil ones, you're probably screwing up.
The person making NFTs of Uyghur prisoners, for example, definitely doesn't care about whether that action was legal and didn't go secure likeness rights or check the license.
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