Julius {l Wrote}:what about the often raised concerns that Free Software shouldn't only be free but also ethical etc.?
It seems pretty clear that you can only fit so many ethics lessons into a license. If we moved that battle to free software licensing, the whole thing would fall apart.
For example, the goal of free software is for all software to be free. Whether it's a crime or not, (and I'm not sure it always is) the DOD uses software. I'm against non-commercial licenses, not only because they're limiting (that's a good reason to avoid them IMO) but also because they're needlessly confusing. Putting ethics in the license would make every download a quandry.
Freedom 0 is "for any purpose" and this would end that, but free software licenses (AFAIK) are triggered by redistribution (specifically "conveying" in GPL3, which perhaps is a subset of redistribution) not by use. So this would also change that to a shrinkwrap kind of deal.
But getting back to my first point, the DOD doesn't have to honour copyright or patents in its goals, they aren't held to either. So all you're doing with the idea is saying "if you want to do something unethical, you should use Windows or a Mac for that." And they don't think you should use Windows or
a Mac for anything, because if you use Windows or a Mac for something unethical, now you have TWO problems (the unethical act plus non-free software.)
If you hit someone with a stick for no reason, it doesn't make the stick unethical, you are the one behaving unethically. If a stick doesn't come with a license restricting its use, that should not be interpreted as condoning unethical uses. Neither is Freedom 0.
Let's move from licenses to law to show how common-sense this is-- imagine a law that says "don't do anything unethical." Far from forcing society to be ethical, it would (if strictly enforced, that is) plunge society into chaos. It isn't well-defined, and a law that isn't well-defined is a TERRIBLE law. So when these amateurs come in and talk about putting such things into the license, where it won't do a lot of good, what they're creating is a very pointless chaos that prevents the licenses from being enforced reasonably-- and thus prevents the licenses from doing any good.
This isn't a defense of bad ethics, it's an argument about what licenses are good for and what they're useless for. Wrong tool for the job.
It's worth noting that both the authors of the Free Software Definition (Stallman) and the Debian Free Software Guidelines and Open Source Definition (Perens) already felt this way 20 years ago, and Perens deliberately put this right into the OSD. (Which he explained recently.) He considered this and deliberately wrote the "Fields of Endeavour" part of the OSD the same way Stallman put in Freedom 0. And Perens noted this again, recently.
Again, if you want to do something unethical with software, and you are told "you have to use non-free software for that"-- now you have two problems. With one exception I can think of: If the unethical act is to create free software-- then of course you have to use non-free software for that.
It is here that it's good to note that using non-free software isn't necessarily an unethical act. Users take it personally when Stallman says that Free software is about ethics. "I'll use whatever software I want" shows they're reacting to something he didn't say.
He considers it unethical to deny users freedom when creating software. The ethical mandate is aimed at software developers, not users in general. While it helps to use free software, because it instructs developers that they'll have to make their software free if they want it to be used be more people, the onus is still on the developer, not the user. It isn't the user that denies freedom to the user, it's the non-free developer.
I think most attempts at that so far either restricted the freedom aspect too much, or backfired pretty badly. But still the overall concern is kind of valid, as I think many people would not like their database application to be used to organize the next genocide or something like that.
The Free Software Definition, despite being political and some would use the world ideological, consists of things that can be helped with software licenses. The Four Freedoms are all things that can be granted by license language.
Broader ethical issues are more complex and would never be possible in a license. It takes the entire legal system just to try to make more things ethical using rules, and it is already overburdened. I think that point more or less proves two things:
1. If you don't want a license as hopelessly complex as the entire legal system itself, don't use the license to try to mandate complex ethical issues.
2. The better way to address ethics by far, is separately from licenses.
While it is probably out of the reach of a license to prevent such an extreme case as the above
Definitely out of the reach
some sort of addendum that the same time doesn't restrict the 4 freedoms is worth thinking about.
It would end the Four Freedoms. I had a similar (milder, though relevant) concern about adding a Fifth Freedom through a sort of Wave Cancellation principle. That isn't just a wild metaphorical notion, it's a known fact that appending a license or set of rules can unintentionally cancel out other parts, in ways that are not obvious (particularly to non-lawyers.) It's one of the primary hazards of writing your own license.
Not only from a ethical perspective, but also to avoid having people resort to licenses that do restrict the 4 freedoms.
Unless I misunderstand you, I think it would have the opposite effect of forcing people to resort to licenses that restrict the 4 Freedoms.
I think some sort of reciprocacy is probably the right solution to this. Similar to how the copyleft model doesn't restrict your freedom, it just mandates that you don't restrict the freedom of others either (this is of course debatable).
You wouldn't want to make a Free software license that is trivial to revoke, it would lead to legal trolling. It is possible to revoke the GPL if certain aspects are not followed, but that is treated by everyone responsible for creating and upholding the license as a last resort, and one worth avoiding if at all possible.
Using the wrong tool for the job isn't a support of better ethics, it's a support of doing something important in a way that is bound to not work well.
I'm not disputing the good intentions of many of the people who have such ideas, though I am fairly certain there are also some people with intentions that are less good, who are making use of those well-intentioned people to disrupt free software. Some of them at least, should know better and likely do.
The people most likely to push this agenda with the press for example, are those who already have Defense contracts-- such as Microsoft. Adding completely unenforceable clauses to Free software licenses would make fear of the license as bad as it was under Steve Ballmer, and people would flock to Free software's very DOD-Friendly competitors-- BSD (started with Defense money) and Microsoft.
They wouldn't flock to non-free software because they disagreed with the ethical issues-- they would flock because they were worried they might inadvertently fail to comply with the license, and for companies that would be too much of a legal and financial liability to risk.
It would be a very good, and very effective attack on Free software to try to make free licenses do a job they can't possibly accomplish.