58 lines
2.3 KiB
Text
58 lines
2.3 KiB
Text
|
---
|
||
|
path: "test"
|
||
|
date: 2020-09-24
|
||
|
title: "Moral licenses can't exist"
|
||
|
---
|
||
|
|
||
|
In the last few years there has been multiple pushes for software developers to
|
||
|
take responsibility for the social damage their software causes. While sentiment
|
||
|
for large tech corportaions have never been too positive, there's been a recent
|
||
|
trend social responsibility in the open source and libre communities. The most
|
||
|
well known instance of this is when a Lerna maintainer merged in a [modified MIT
|
||
|
license][lerna-license] forbidding specific entities from using Lerna, but this
|
||
|
isn't the only instance of such "social good" licenses. You
|
||
|
|
||
|
#### Licenses aren't nuanced
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
#### Case study: Lerna License
|
||
|
|
||
|
The original GitHub Pull Request can be found [here][lerna-pr], and I highly
|
||
|
suggest reading all of it and the related links in lieu of the recap below.
|
||
|
|
||
|
##### What happened?
|
||
|
|
||
|
The sudden change from the MIT license to the Lerna license brought upon a very
|
||
|
dramatic response from the internet. That one PR was hit the top of many
|
||
|
subreddits and the top of hackernews. Microsoft, a directly named forbidden
|
||
|
entity, had temporarily paused some of its work due to legal concerns The internet then responds, drawing dozens of
|
||
|
comments and issues on GitHub on both the original Pull Request and the
|
||
|
subsequent reversion, forcing the original author of the Lerna license to step
|
||
|
in, before finally removing the original author of the Lerna license from the
|
||
|
GitHub organization before comments stopped. At some point, Lerna was forked
|
||
|
multiple times in as a contingecy plan in case Lerna kept with its now
|
||
|
short-lived license.
|
||
|
|
||
|
##### Are moral licenses censorship?
|
||
|
|
||
|
> The [inter]Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The parallels with John Gilmore's message back in 1993 is undeniable, but it
|
||
|
doesn't necessarily mean that these licenses are considered censorship. It
|
||
|
doesn't hurt to consider the question, either.
|
||
|
|
||
|
#### Case study: Anti-Capitialist License
|
||
|
|
||
|
#### Case study: The Hippocratic License
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
#### Ethical licenses
|
||
|
|
||
|
#### Violations need to be caught
|
||
|
|
||
|
#### Moral licenses can't exist
|
||
|
|
||
|
[lerna-license]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lerna/lerna/7963cb713ae77a243336efb422d027928292cf3d/LICENSE
|
||
|
[lerna-pr]: https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1616
|
||
|
[emergence]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
|