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by skybrian 444 days ago
I also found that confusing. My guess as to what they mean is that if someone makes changes, they are not obligated to share them with the world?

That is, they are against free and indiscriminate sharing, which would allow bad people to use their software.

They link directly to this Q&A in the OSI FAQ:

> Can I stop “evil people” from using my program?

> No. The Open Source Definition specifies that Open Source licenses may not discriminate against persons or groups. Giving everyone freedom means giving evil people freedom, too.

1 comments

You can very much restrict software from being used in certain ways and for certain purposes and still be Open Source. Focus more on the "how" than the "who".

Making the claim that OSI necessitates "genocide-friendly licenses" is not a constructive direction.

OP could conceivably have come up with an alternative license preserving the freedoms without allowing the uses they disagree with. They chose the easier path, which is by itself fine. Painting the entire FLOSS community as genocide enablers and claiming there is no middle ground as long as the author is not in complete control of all redistribution and derivatives ("right to refuse") is unnecessary.

Not that this is a good idea, but how do you suppose a window manager could be modified so that it's not useful for "bad" purposes?

It seems difficult to do for general-purpose software.

I'm saying you could forbid it in the license. Like some licenses might allow personal but not non-commercial use, you could come up with other disallowed uses. Seems like a better idea than attempting to limits its use to your in-group.