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