---
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