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by auggierose 4458 days ago
There is a simple solution to this. When you publish open source software, make sure that in your license it says that Goldman Sachs is not allowed to use this code for any purpose whatsoever.
4 comments

Rule #5 of an Open Source license: "The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons."

http://opensource.org/osd-annotated

There's nothing that stops you from actually putting that clause in your license, just don't call it the GPL or MIT or whatever.

"My code is freely licensed open source, Based on GPL, with the addendum that Goldman Sachs can go stick their head in a pig"

As I understand it, there is nothing preventing this from happening.

Sure, you can do it. Once you do, though, your code is not open source.
>Sure, you can do it. Once you do, though, your code is not open source.

It is surely open source. It's just not Open Source. An important difference because of the capitalization.

If you don't want to deliberately confuse people, you would say "the source code is available" or something like that, because most people take open source to mean this:

http://opensource.org/osd

So that even if they're speaking out loud, where one can't see capitalization, everyone knows what they mean.

I am pretty sure this is a violation of one of the four freedoms, namely freedom 0:

   The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
I wonder if they'd care. Sounds like they don't particularly care about the licenses on the open source code they use, and I doubt you'd find out that they're violating your license.
Why not throw in a lot of other "evil" entities too. Soon, we'll have jslint's license!