<story><title>Do we need to rethink what free software is?</title><url>https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52907.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rubbingalcohol</author><text>Whether software is used for ethical or unethical purposes has nothing to do with the license. There is no possible way to bake subjective ethical usage guidelines into a license and still end up with free software.&lt;p&gt;Trying to license &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; boils down to the same slippery slope that the TOR Project dealt with when they had to reject requests to add censorship mechanisms. &amp;quot;Can&amp;#x27;t we just censor hate speech?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Software is a tool. How that tool is used is at the discretion of the user. If a developer is concerned that a project could be used for evil, then he or she should consider whether releasing the software publicly is a morally good choice in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xisukar</author><text>I couldn&amp;#x27;t have written it better myself.&lt;p&gt;On a related note, the person behind the Hippocratic License (HL) which they define as &amp;quot;a modified MIT license that specifically prohibits the use of open source software to harm others&amp;quot; was recently asked by OSI [1] to modify the language in the original document since it might&amp;#x27;ve led people to wrongly believe that the aforementioned license was Open Source Software and that software distributed under it was Open Source Software.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.is&amp;#x2F;hKA41&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.is&amp;#x2F;hKA41&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Do we need to rethink what free software is?</title><url>https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52907.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rubbingalcohol</author><text>Whether software is used for ethical or unethical purposes has nothing to do with the license. There is no possible way to bake subjective ethical usage guidelines into a license and still end up with free software.&lt;p&gt;Trying to license &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; boils down to the same slippery slope that the TOR Project dealt with when they had to reject requests to add censorship mechanisms. &amp;quot;Can&amp;#x27;t we just censor hate speech?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Software is a tool. How that tool is used is at the discretion of the user. If a developer is concerned that a project could be used for evil, then he or she should consider whether releasing the software publicly is a morally good choice in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>atoav</author><text>I am not sure about that. Of course enforcing your usage ideas will be next to impossible, but mentioning sth. can serve other purposes too (e.g. making a set of shared values visible to other developers).&lt;p&gt;So if you for example say that everybody except military, secret services and weapons manufacturers are allowed to use your software, that might not stop them from using it, but it makes other devs consider similar clauses and at one point it might be widespread enough to show some sort of effect (e.g. less people willing to work for the goons).</text></comment>