[teloli]

One thing the human race should have learned from history is that once you start restricting individual freedom, you know where you begin but you don't know where you end.

You don't want corporations to use your software, fine, fuck Google. Then one day you find out that the police may use the software, so you add "law enforcement" to the list of fields of endeavor you want to restrict.

Then it's the military, and that's where the definitions get tricky. The "Cooperative Nonviolent Licenses", just as an example, would have probably not been usable by the Anarchist Confederal militias in the Spanish Civil War.

A think tank promoting nuclear energy uses the license, is that fine? How about a neo-nazi nonprofit?

Soon enough the list of groups you don't like is gonna get long.

[openfuture]

Why do people think these things get respected? What ultimate authority is omniscient in this way? The fact is that if I can access the source then it is effectively FOSS, especially if I'm a military.

Please take a long hard look at how the implicit assumptions behind these discussions do not line up with reality and then move on to building the web of trust with me :P

[OkayPhysicist]

> Soon enough the list of groups you don't like is gonna get long.

That follows, because there is a lot of evil in this world. If I want to make a token gesture (which I realistically have somewhere between a limited and no ability to enforce against a bunch of armed hooligans like the police or military) against that evil, that's my prerogative.

[teloli]

> there is a lot of evil in this world

Maybe, but evil vs good is very subjective and leads to paradoxes like the “anti-capitalist software license” not being usable by one of the most popular examples of anti-capitalism in history, namely the CNT militias in revolutionary Catalonia.

> a bunch of armed hooligans like the police or military

Your hooligan is someone else’s freedom fighter though. /me looks dramatically in the general direction of Kiev

[OkayPhysicist]

"Not being usable" is an odd phrasing. 1) if they asked, after my initial shock of "omg, 1936 called" I'd happily license it to them, and 2) by the time you're in an armed resistance software copyright is the least of your concerns.

But more importantly, people being able to have varying opinions does not make all opinions correct, just, or even respectable. Ethics are universal: they are the framework from which we judge the actions of both ourselves and others. An assertion that "Doing good is doing what you think is good" is a cop-out, and an (absurd) ethical argument in of itself. Evil people are perfectly capable of rationalizing evil to themselves, they don't need radical subjectivists cheerleading from the sidelines.

[tovej]

And why is a long list necessarily bad?

[teloli]

With remarkable consistency across space and time, those lists have historically grown from “the capitalists” to “their allies” to “the counter-revolutionaries” to “the enemies of The People“ to “the enemies of The Party”

[tovej]

Wow, that's some wild extrapolation (and association) there.

[sph]

A "do not use this software for evil" license is morally identical to one that states "only use this software for evil".

The best licenses are those that just say "there you go, do whatever you want, but don't fucking sue me." (That means pretty much all mainstream open source licenses)

[OkayPhysicist]

No, the best licenses are the ones that say "there you go, do whatever you want, but pay it forward", like the (A/L)GPL. It's an astute solution to the free-rider problem inherent to large gift economies: once you pass the scale where individual reputation is the driving factor in engagement with the economy, it's easy to accumulate a parasitic group that takes from the generosity of others, but not only offers nothing in return, but expands itself to deprive more resources from the economy at large.

Copyleft licenses are a defense tool against those parasites. You're free to use the software, anyway you like. You're free to modify the software in anyway you feel fit. The only restriction is that if you choose to share it with others, than you grant them the same freedoms you've been so generously given yourself.