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The author obviously thinks that open source that discriminates cannot be open source. In principle this is true given the current Open Source license. But i

The author obviously thinks that open source that discriminates cannot be open source. In principle this is true given the current Open Source license. But i would argue that the clause about discrimination is out of touch with reality. Usage rights to Open Source should not by default be granted to oppressive regimes and the author should absolutely be allowed to state that within the license. If the west wants to send a clear signal to Putin, then matters such as the wording of the Open Source license needs to be adjusted accordingly.

beny23 5y ago
Hello, author here. I do think the open source licence is framed to be non-discriminatory and I think that’s not a bad thing. Discrimination lends itself to politicisation and in turn division. And I think an ecosystem where we have lots of division is not good. What would happen if two interdependent projects suddenly had conflicting political requirements?
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  I think that holding onto the idea that software is apolitical is untenable. Social media companies and large corporations try to toe this line and have been widely rebuked for it (Google trying to get ICE contracts, for example). I think the idea that "everything is political" is taking it too far, but so is the idea that providing material support to any comers is apolitical. Bear in mind that I'm talking descriptively rather than prescriptively here. I have my own opinions but I can also observe that political neutrality as a concept is waning.
  - quinnjh 5y ago
    Ok so its political, what if this political take where we encourage openness and interconnectivity is superior to the political take where we are reactionary? What if it literally is a winning strategy? Im not saying it is necessarily- but i think to get past the division you have highlighted (apolitical universality vs political conservatism) there is perhaps a way to look at the various approaches and determine what approach would be technologically, logistically, and politically advantageous. Let us let go of the idea it is apolitical, what now?
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      I do think that we should look at these choices through a utilitarian lens and consider both the immediate and long term impact of such decisions. I do think that innocent Russian civilians will inevitably get caught in the crossfire with sanctions, which is unfortunate. I still believe that it is a moral good to penalise colonialism and other unethical activity through withdrawal of material support because this increases the cost of such actions. I'm not sure what justification there could be that continuing material support for an expansionist government during an invasion has positive utility, it smells like an argument for consistency to me but I'd be happy to be corrected.
      - quinnjh 5y ago
        Something that comes to mind is the argument against aid NGOs in places with dire poverty and hunger. When an NGO comes to your town, where you are trying to build a farm business, and delivers months worth of free rice, can you afford to run your business? Similarly, can any russians make successful software as a service that analogues FOSS offerings? No they cant, because the alternative is available and free. Remove the free rice and you satisfy your egos necessity for first order moral resolution via punishment- bad people dont get rice- but as for second order effects? Perhaps now it becomes feasible to build a sustainable farm (or apache competitor)
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        The aid NGO question comes down to whether locals can build a self supporting economy and whether the aid is hampering economic development - but it isn't a binary question because you can subsidise farmers or reduce aid commensurate with local supply. I'm familiar with second order effects, and nth order effects and nonlinear causality. If we restrict Russia's access to Apache Web server, sure, they will eventually develop a local equivalent. So, over time they transition from being disadvantaged to simply leveling the playing field. That's a pretty good outcome, especially if many more open source projects could withdraw from Russia.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
- sharken 5y ago
  Hi, must say that it's a thoughtful article that has valid points. Maybe as a European i feel more strongly about this, but every means possible must be employed to send a clear signal to Russia about the unacceptable state of affairs. Except destructive changes as in the second example, that behavior should not be allowed by the Open Source license. I'm still hopeful that a better wording can be found going forward.
  - Delk 5y ago
    Almost everyone's sympathies are with Ukraine now, and Russia under its current regime is rightly being sanctioned by measures that are intended to hurt. Sanctions that aren't felt are meaningless. When it comes to open source licensing, though, the problem with these kinds of exceptions tends to be that there are a lot of causes that would, at one time or another or from one perspective or another, seem to warrant similar exceptions. There are other wars going on, with more or less clear aggressors. Should we build a list, somewhat akin to the U.S. export restrictions, that forbade using the software by the aggressive states? How would we make sure that the lists aren't influenced by political leanings or cultural preconceptions? (Hint: you can't.) It would be objectively easy to argue that people who eat meat should be sanctioned to give them a "clear signal" that they shouldn't. It would be emotionally easy to argue that perhaps we should exclude people who violate human rights from using our software -- although what exactly constitutes such a violation would be pretty hard to delineate. In a different culture, objectively or not, entirely different acts might be considered morally contemptible or even unforgivable. Allowing exceptions to open source terms based on individual reasons would lead to a jungle of rules that would end up ruining open source, even if each exception by itself can be easy to argue for. You could no longer build a Linux distribution or any kind of a large collection of software, or even an open source application that relied on lots of open source libraries for its functionality. That is, unless you decided not to include any software that had licenses with any such exceptions. That's exactly what drawing the line for the meaning of "open source" is. If you only take one of those exceptions and not the others, that's no longer an objective choice, and others are going to have different exceptions; if you take them all, you create an untenable mess, or at least a walled garden with really tight walls. At any given time it may feel like this is the one exception we should make, and it feels right at that moment. It just can't be done with any consistency without massive collateral damage in the big picture. By all means, let's cause trouble to Russia (under its current regime) as long as it restricts their ability to wage war. Let's do that even if it costs us. But let's not do it in such a way that it creates a massive moral or legal conundrum in the long run. Even if it feels right at the moment. - Another European, living less than 200 km from Russia
- mistrial9 5y ago
  long-term OSS author here - strong agree "the open source license is framed to be non-discriminatory" is the "right thing" for Intelligent Humans of every color, creed and mother-language
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  > What would happen if two interdependent projects suddenly had conflicting political requirements? The same thing that happens when two countries have irreconcilable differences. Software is a human artifact and subject to the same principles as all such artifacts.
pie_flavor 5y ago
A principle being out of touch with reality doesn't mean you get to redefine what the principle means; if you view its out-of-touchness as a mark against the principle, reject the principle. What you're really saying is that you want the social benefit of claiming to adhere to the principle, while not actually adhering the principle. 'The west' does not own open-source any more than Putin does, and if you intentionally make your software non-open-source to send a message to Putin, that's your right, but you can't keep pretending to be open-source if you do.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rectang 5y ago
You're welcome to license your software under terms that discriminate against oppressive regimes. Just don't call it "open source". The argument that software licenses should exclude certain people or fields of endeavor has been around for decades. Such licenses are outside the scope of Open Source. Specifically, such licenses do not conform to the Open Source Definition clauses 5 and 6: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd > 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups > The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. > 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
FooBarWidget 5y ago
Such discrimination is a form of sanction. It has been shown over and over again that sanctions do nothing to change governments — all they succeed in is to harm the lives of ordinary people. This makes license discrimination on such grounds nothing more than virtue signalling at best, and a punishment to ordinary people at worst. Furthermore, the label "oppressive regime" is sometimes more propaganda than fact. Many western countries weaponize human rights by labeling enemy states as oppressive regimes, while either ignoring/muffling their own human rights abuses, or (more likely) having systems that allow one to protest against domestic human rights abuses while failing to change a single thing about them no matter how much people protest; and at the same time, turning a blind eye on actual oppressive regimes that happen to be allied states (until they fall out of grace, after which they will once again be labeled "oppressive regimes"). This makes license discrimination on the grounds of the "oppressive regime" label highly problematic and prone to geopolitical propaganda games. At worst, you can even say that such license discriminations become willing tools of geopolitical propaganda.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  The current sanctions are doing a great job of hurting the Russian economy and, by extension, its ability to rip apart the flesh of 6 year old girls hiding in hospitals in Mariupol.
  - HideousKojima 5y ago
    Actually they've done a great job driving up oil and gas prices, which actually helps the Russian economy because European countries are too dependent (and spineless) to cut off Russian gas pipelines.
    - sharken 5y ago
      Sad but true, I'm still hopeful that Europe will drop Russian oil and gas soon, regardless of the consequences.
    - nix23 5y ago
      And sanctions who target the "normal" citizen give Putin a really sharp knife to proof that the "west" really wants to harm Russians....what else then sanctions can be done? I honestly don't know.
HideousKojima 5y ago
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freedom-to-run.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed... "I've stated above some parts of my views about certain political issues unrelated to the issue of free software—about which of those activities are or aren't unjust. Your views about them might differ, and that's precisely the point. If we accepted programs with usage restrictions as part of a free operating system such as GNU, people would come up with lots of different usage restrictions. There would be programs banned for use in meat processing, programs banned only for pigs, programs banned only for cows, and programs limited to kosher foods. Someone who hates spinach might license a program to allow use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan's program might allow only use for spinach. There would be music programs allowed only for rap music, and others allowed only for classical music." "The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task. Not only for the components you explicitly use, but also for the hundreds of components that they link with, invoke, or communicate with." "How would users respond to that? I think most of them would use proprietary systems. Allowing usage restrictions in free software would mainly push users towards nonfree software. Trying to stop users from doing something through usage restrictions in free software is as ineffective as pushing on an object through a long, straight, soft piece of cooked spaghetti." "It is worse than ineffective; it is wrong too, because software developers should not exercise such power over what users do. Imagine selling pens with conditions about what you can write with them; that would be noisome, and we should not stand for it. Likewise for general software. If you make something that is generally useful, like a pen, people will use it to write all sorts of things, even horrible things such as orders to torture a dissident; but you must not have the power to control people's activities through their pens. It is the same for a text editor, compiler or kernel."
- sharken 5y ago
  Richard Stallman talks about free software which is a different concept than Open Source. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... Open Source is right now defined as open for everyone by the license, ie. the paragraph about not discriminating. Perhaps the only sane way for Open Source to exist is to not discriminate.
jahewson 5y ago
Firstly what even is an “oppressive regime” can we agree on a definition? I don’t think so. Certainly not in the boundary cases. Secondly, why would any such oppressive regime care about your license? What are you going to do, sue them?

beny23 5y ago

Hello, author here. I do think the open source licence is framed to be non-discriminatory and I think that’s not a bad thing. Discrimination lends itself to politicisation and in turn division. And I think an ecosystem where we have lots of division is not good. What would happen if two interdependent projects suddenly had conflicting political requirements?

beaconstudios 5y ago
I think that holding onto the idea that software is apolitical is untenable. Social media companies and large corporations try to toe this line and have been widely rebuked for it (Google trying to get ICE contracts, for example). I think the idea that "everything is political" is taking it too far, but so is the idea that providing material support to any comers is apolitical. Bear in mind that I'm talking descriptively rather than prescriptively here. I have my own opinions but I can also observe that political neutrality as a concept is waning.
- quinnjh 5y ago
  Ok so its political, what if this political take where we encourage openness and interconnectivity is superior to the political take where we are reactionary? What if it literally is a winning strategy? Im not saying it is necessarily- but i think to get past the division you have highlighted (apolitical universality vs political conservatism) there is perhaps a way to look at the various approaches and determine what approach would be technologically, logistically, and politically advantageous. Let us let go of the idea it is apolitical, what now?
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    I do think that we should look at these choices through a utilitarian lens and consider both the immediate and long term impact of such decisions. I do think that innocent Russian civilians will inevitably get caught in the crossfire with sanctions, which is unfortunate. I still believe that it is a moral good to penalise colonialism and other unethical activity through withdrawal of material support because this increases the cost of such actions. I'm not sure what justification there could be that continuing material support for an expansionist government during an invasion has positive utility, it smells like an argument for consistency to me but I'd be happy to be corrected.
    - quinnjh 5y ago
      Something that comes to mind is the argument against aid NGOs in places with dire poverty and hunger. When an NGO comes to your town, where you are trying to build a farm business, and delivers months worth of free rice, can you afford to run your business? Similarly, can any russians make successful software as a service that analogues FOSS offerings? No they cant, because the alternative is available and free. Remove the free rice and you satisfy your egos necessity for first order moral resolution via punishment- bad people dont get rice- but as for second order effects? Perhaps now it becomes feasible to build a sustainable farm (or apache competitor)
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        The aid NGO question comes down to whether locals can build a self supporting economy and whether the aid is hampering economic development - but it isn't a binary question because you can subsidise farmers or reduce aid commensurate with local supply. I'm familiar with second order effects, and nth order effects and nonlinear causality. If we restrict Russia's access to Apache Web server, sure, they will eventually develop a local equivalent. So, over time they transition from being disadvantaged to simply leveling the playing field. That's a pretty good outcome, especially if many more open source projects could withdraw from Russia.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
sharken 5y ago
Hi, must say that it's a thoughtful article that has valid points. Maybe as a European i feel more strongly about this, but every means possible must be employed to send a clear signal to Russia about the unacceptable state of affairs. Except destructive changes as in the second example, that behavior should not be allowed by the Open Source license. I'm still hopeful that a better wording can be found going forward.
- Delk 5y ago
  Almost everyone's sympathies are with Ukraine now, and Russia under its current regime is rightly being sanctioned by measures that are intended to hurt. Sanctions that aren't felt are meaningless. When it comes to open source licensing, though, the problem with these kinds of exceptions tends to be that there are a lot of causes that would, at one time or another or from one perspective or another, seem to warrant similar exceptions. There are other wars going on, with more or less clear aggressors. Should we build a list, somewhat akin to the U.S. export restrictions, that forbade using the software by the aggressive states? How would we make sure that the lists aren't influenced by political leanings or cultural preconceptions? (Hint: you can't.) It would be objectively easy to argue that people who eat meat should be sanctioned to give them a "clear signal" that they shouldn't. It would be emotionally easy to argue that perhaps we should exclude people who violate human rights from using our software -- although what exactly constitutes such a violation would be pretty hard to delineate. In a different culture, objectively or not, entirely different acts might be considered morally contemptible or even unforgivable. Allowing exceptions to open source terms based on individual reasons would lead to a jungle of rules that would end up ruining open source, even if each exception by itself can be easy to argue for. You could no longer build a Linux distribution or any kind of a large collection of software, or even an open source application that relied on lots of open source libraries for its functionality. That is, unless you decided not to include any software that had licenses with any such exceptions. That's exactly what drawing the line for the meaning of "open source" is. If you only take one of those exceptions and not the others, that's no longer an objective choice, and others are going to have different exceptions; if you take them all, you create an untenable mess, or at least a walled garden with really tight walls. At any given time it may feel like this is the one exception we should make, and it feels right at that moment. It just can't be done with any consistency without massive collateral damage in the big picture. By all means, let's cause trouble to Russia (under its current regime) as long as it restricts their ability to wage war. Let's do that even if it costs us. But let's not do it in such a way that it creates a massive moral or legal conundrum in the long run. Even if it feels right at the moment. - Another European, living less than 200 km from Russia
mistrial9 5y ago
long-term OSS author here - strong agree "the open source license is framed to be non-discriminatory" is the "right thing" for Intelligent Humans of every color, creed and mother-language
shadowgovt 5y ago
> What would happen if two interdependent projects suddenly had conflicting political requirements? The same thing that happens when two countries have irreconcilable differences. Software is a human artifact and subject to the same principles as all such artifacts.

pie_flavor 5y ago

A principle being out of touch with reality doesn't mean you get to redefine what the principle means; if you view its out-of-touchness as a mark against the principle, reject the principle. What you're really saying is that you want the social benefit of claiming to adhere to the principle, while not actually adhering the principle. 'The west' does not own open-source any more than Putin does, and if you intentionally make your software non-open-source to send a message to Putin, that's your right, but you can't keep pretending to be open-source if you do.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rectang 5y ago

You're welcome to license your software under terms that discriminate against oppressive regimes. Just don't call it "open source". The argument that software licenses should exclude certain people or fields of endeavor has been around for decades. Such licenses are outside the scope of Open Source. Specifically, such licenses do not conform to the Open Source Definition clauses 5 and 6: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd > 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups > The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. > 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

FooBarWidget 5y ago

Such discrimination is a form of sanction. It has been shown over and over again that sanctions do nothing to change governments — all they succeed in is to harm the lives of ordinary people. This makes license discrimination on such grounds nothing more than virtue signalling at best, and a punishment to ordinary people at worst. Furthermore, the label "oppressive regime" is sometimes more propaganda than fact. Many western countries weaponize human rights by labeling enemy states as oppressive regimes, while either ignoring/muffling their own human rights abuses, or (more likely) having systems that allow one to protest against domestic human rights abuses while failing to change a single thing about them no matter how much people protest; and at the same time, turning a blind eye on actual oppressive regimes that happen to be allied states (until they fall out of grace, after which they will once again be labeled "oppressive regimes"). This makes license discrimination on the grounds of the "oppressive regime" label highly problematic and prone to geopolitical propaganda games. At worst, you can even say that such license discriminations become willing tools of geopolitical propaganda.

tomjen3 5y ago
The current sanctions are doing a great job of hurting the Russian economy and, by extension, its ability to rip apart the flesh of 6 year old girls hiding in hospitals in Mariupol.
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  Actually they've done a great job driving up oil and gas prices, which actually helps the Russian economy because European countries are too dependent (and spineless) to cut off Russian gas pipelines.
  - sharken 5y ago
    Sad but true, I'm still hopeful that Europe will drop Russian oil and gas soon, regardless of the consequences.
  - nix23 5y ago
    And sanctions who target the "normal" citizen give Putin a really sharp knife to proof that the "west" really wants to harm Russians....what else then sanctions can be done? I honestly don't know.

HideousKojima 5y ago

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freedom-to-run.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed... "I've stated above some parts of my views about certain political issues unrelated to the issue of free software—about which of those activities are or aren't unjust. Your views about them might differ, and that's precisely the point. If we accepted programs with usage restrictions as part of a free operating system such as GNU, people would come up with lots of different usage restrictions. There would be programs banned for use in meat processing, programs banned only for pigs, programs banned only for cows, and programs limited to kosher foods. Someone who hates spinach might license a program to allow use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan's program might allow only use for spinach. There would be music programs allowed only for rap music, and others allowed only for classical music." "The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task. Not only for the components you explicitly use, but also for the hundreds of components that they link with, invoke, or communicate with." "How would users respond to that? I think most of them would use proprietary systems. Allowing usage restrictions in free software would mainly push users towards nonfree software. Trying to stop users from doing something through usage restrictions in free software is as ineffective as pushing on an object through a long, straight, soft piece of cooked spaghetti." "It is worse than ineffective; it is wrong too, because software developers should not exercise such power over what users do. Imagine selling pens with conditions about what you can write with them; that would be noisome, and we should not stand for it. Likewise for general software. If you make something that is generally useful, like a pen, people will use it to write all sorts of things, even horrible things such as orders to torture a dissident; but you must not have the power to control people's activities through their pens. It is the same for a text editor, compiler or kernel."

sharken 5y ago
Richard Stallman talks about free software which is a different concept than Open Source. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... Open Source is right now defined as open for everyone by the license, ie. the paragraph about not discriminating. Perhaps the only sane way for Open Source to exist is to not discriminate.

jahewson 5y ago

Firstly what even is an “oppressive regime” can we agree on a definition? I don’t think so. Certainly not in the boundary cases. Secondly, why would any such oppressive regime care about your license? What are you going to do, sue them?