Hi Ashley! On Tuesday 20 February 2007, Ashley Pond V wrote: > I didn't want to feed this so responded personally to a couple off > list. Y'all couldn't resist sharing your politics and goofs though so… > I apologize to the disinterested if this just feeds it. > > I find it difficult to believe, being a middling hacker compared to > some of you guys, that I'm the only one on this list who has ever > written code that ended up used by a military group; or the only one > who regretted it. > > I expressed interest in such a license getting hammered out by some > experts because I don't like being a party to mass murder. Between > 200,000 and 750,000 (depending on whose figures you prefer) Iraqis have > died at the hands of the US government since 1990. They can take my tax > money to do it at the threat of prison but I would like to think it > *might* be possible to stop them from taking my otherwise freely given > work (the lack of Earth-moving nature of which is entirely irrelevant > to any such debate) to do it. If such a license would be immaterial > then so are all other petitions. > > The license I'd love to see would be a Non-Governmental (Personal and > Private Industry Only). One can crack wise or politicize the idea but > it is worth bringing up. Whether or not others would honor such a > license does not mitigate one's attempt to live ethically. >
As you may well be aware the Free Software Definition: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Specifically says that the software should have: <<< The freedom to run the program, for any purpose. >>> The Open Source Definition ( http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php ) in articles 5 6 prohibit discrimination against persons or groups or against fields of endeavour. Thus, if you prohibit use of your code by militaries or otherwise government entities, it won't be free software or open source. Furthermore, your code will be rendered incompatible with the GPL and similar licences that can only be linked against a certain subset of such licences. See for example: http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html Now, why was free software defined as such that is available to be used "for any purpose"? I don't know for sure, but I have my own reasons for that. Let's suppose you and a few people make your software prohibited for used by armed forces. Now there are also many anarchists in the world, who dislike governments, and some of them are going to restrict their software from being used by governments. Then I would decide that due to the fact I hate racism, then my software cannot be used for racist purposes. And a bunch of Antisemites are going to restrict their software from being used by Jews. As a result, the "open-source" software world will become fractured by such restricted software, and people who would like to make use of various pieces of software for their own use will have to carefully look at all of their licences for such incompatibilities with their purposes. Furthermore, let's suppose I'm a consultant who sets up web-sites. I'd like to write a Content Management System for facilitating my present and future work. However, since I don't know who my future clients are going to be I won't be able to use any of this software for fear my future client would be a military group, a government, a racist person or organisation, a Jew or someone whose first name starts with the letter "S". Eventually, I may have to implement everything from scratch. As someone wise has once commented "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", and what I said just proved it. I find a lot of value in keeping open source software usable by everybody for every purpose. If you want to make your software unlike this, you have the right to, but be aware that I and many other people won't get near it with a ten foot pole, and it won't become part of most distributions, or be used by most open-source projects. So you'll essentially make it unusable. So you should choose whether you want to make your software popular, or you want to protect its "abuse" but also prevent almost every legitimate use of it. Regards, Shlomi Fish --------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.shlomifish.org/ Chuck Norris wrote a complete Perl 6 implementation in a day but then destroyed all evidence with his bare hands, so no one will know his secrets.
