| Hogwash. Source code is as moral or immoral as a box of nails. You can use it for good and you can use it for evil. The reason why we've had such a massive boost in productivity in tech is precisely because of all this unpaid labor. Does it suck that the builders of said code didn't receive much (or any) compensation for their work? Sure, but then again, that was never the point. You don't volunteer at the local SPCA and then complain that you weren't rewarded enough. Open source has eaten the world. Most of the closed protocols, closed formats, closed systems, closed specifications, etc have died over the past decade, precisely because we have freely available interoperable software and specifications. This "ethical code" movement will only gum up the works by mixing in a whole bunch of incompatible licenses: This npm component requires that you not use it in nuclear tech. That component requires that you not eat meat. This one requires that you not have dealings with China. It'll be chaos because nobody could ever satisfy them all, which means that no legal department would ever authorize its use, until a few sane people managing these software collections/repositories finally wake up and say "No crazy licensing allowed." Leave politics out of the tools you build. Politics don't belong there. |
Why not? I understand the argument that it will be problematic for consumers to intermingle licenses; that's fine, if it's cheaper for you to rebuild a library than it is to audit licenses then that's fine.
Beyond that, I don't understand why it's undesirable for you to specify that your creations are not used in ways that you find morally reprehensible. It's functionally the same as an embargo; we, as a nation, ban trade of items with nations whom we have found guilty of violating some moral principle.
I would counter that by allowing your work to be used in potentially immoral acts, you are complicit in those acts. If you create an image recognition algorithm that ends up being used in drones, you have helped the resulting drone strikes be launched just as if you had worked for the army. You are effectively working for the army, but for free.
> This "ethical code" movement will only gum up the works by mixing in a whole bunch of incompatible licenses
Which we literally already have. Have you looked up the compatibility chart for the GPL? Almost nothing widely used is compatible with it: http://gplv3.fsf.org/wiki/index.php/Compatible_licenses
Not to mention that none of your examples are incompatible. Sure, one could potentially have a license that says "you must use it in nuclear tech", but that seems odd, no?