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I mean those sorts of issues are unavoidable and would be discussed in a court where there would probably be some invocation of what "a typical person finds" of

I mean those sorts of issues are unavoidable and would be discussed in a court where there would probably be some invocation of what "a typical person finds" offensive, as has happened in obscenity cases before. What I made sure to be part of my very popular answer on the OSS stack exchange about GPL, is a very careful perspective I have on this whole licensing debate. And that is, a license should be understood as fundamentally "about" what you are willing to sue over. Like, folks take a very moral view of licenses, what "should" you do with the software, what "can't" you do with it, etc., and the pragmatic statement is: you can do things, you just might get sued. A license is saying what conditions will definitely not brook a lawsuit. When you start to see licenses-as-lawsuits, the BSD and MIT licenses are just like "look I don't want to sue you and I don't want you to sue me, let's agree to not do that." The GPL is much more "look I don't want to sue you and I don't want you to sue anybody else and I would be willing to sue you to stop you from suing other people," which is why it is much much longer than those other languages, that's a much more subtle point. This is just saying "look I for the most part don't want to sue you but if I find out that you are promoting things that I find deeply morally offensive, such as {insert list of topics} then I might sue you if you're using my software for that." There's nothing too "not-thought-through" about this, it's just a matter that might have to be litigated where you say "look I don't personally lobby for abortion, just abortion-lobbyists use my platform" and some lawyers make some reasonable cases on both sides and some judge decides on some clarifying line as a result of the argument.

mytailorisrich 6y ago
"excessively gory" is open to interpretation but it's a strange concept to allow gory but not excessively gory... On the other hand, the other point of my previous comment is not open to interpretation: Not the majority of income is fine and because they use 'or' the fact that I lobby, promote, or support is irrelevant and all that matters is the majority of income. So I can use the Work for a free app that promotes abortion, for example. This is permitted although this is contradicting what they seem to want to achieve.
- mannerheim 6y ago
  I would imagine that otherwise if you happened to have a client who derived income from sex trafficking that would present a problem. Or even a client's client. E.g., Paypal might be deriving income from sex trafficking if a sex worker takes payment via it. Not that the rest of the license is unworkably vague, but that limitation at least makes some sense.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

"excessively gory" is open to interpretation but it's a strange concept to allow gory but not excessively gory... On the other hand, the other point of my previous comment is not open to interpretation: Not the majority of income is fine and because they use 'or' the fact that I lobby, promote, or support is irrelevant and all that matters is the majority of income. So I can use the Work for a free app that promotes abortion, for example. This is permitted although this is contradicting what they seem to want to achieve.

mannerheim 6y ago
I would imagine that otherwise if you happened to have a client who derived income from sex trafficking that would present a problem. Or even a client's client. E.g., Paypal might be deriving income from sex trafficking if a sex worker takes payment via it. Not that the rest of the license is unworkably vague, but that limitation at least makes some sense.