Before write what I am about to write, I would like to be clear that this is a very controversial topic and, for the eyes of many of you, this will be even silly.

I also know that open source means "open for everyone", and any conditional to that automatically makes a piece of software non-open source.

I really feel pissed off to see such effort for brilliant people from open source community being used for terrible things. So I started to nurture the idea of a license that would forbid the usage of a project by totalitarian governments, including its department and contractors, military forces of any country, certain entities like radical political parties, etc. Basically limiting the usage of those projects to any activity promoting human suffering.

Do you guys think that this is utopic? Does it really hurt the essence of open source? Do you think in the same way about this, and if yes, how do you cope with that?

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[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

How do you define totalitarian governments in an actionable way? The license is a legal document.

And what if the shitty government doesn't give a shit about your license because it's shitty?

What if excluding any group of people in this way is actually illegal?

That said, lots of licenses exist, e.g. non-commercial ones. Check them all out, don't write a new one.

[+] LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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[–] comfy@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We have all kinds of other licenses that people disrespect, yet we have them and try to enforce them where we can. I don’t seewhy this would be any different, even if it’s a very difficult challenge.

Laws mean nothing as ideals, like you said, they need enforcement. Unless we engage in vigilante action, we rely on existing law enforcement systems, which do have biases and vested interests and therefore an incentive to ignore many of these criteria. Drunk driving is a case where most governments can look at it and see the obvious benefit to society and its rule, and will bother to at least try to enforce it. And LEA have resources that enable them to enforce that. This kind of license, on the other hand, doesn't have that same motivation nor capability. Who's going to stop a military using it? Their own government? Another government?

It's completely utopian.

[–] Coding4Fun@lemmy.ml -1 points 1 week ago

A good start to define an authoritarian government is recognizing what Amnesty International says. It is credible.

For a totalitarian government, there is no law enforcement. And I would say that you are absolutely right saying that no license will stop the usage in this case.

But there are other implications that could come from a restrictive licensing like make the distribution hard in that country, make it impossible to sell solutions with unlawful licensing to countries that are not totalitarian, make it hard or impossible to obtain support for that.

But in essence, more than everything, is the open source community sending a clear message that we don't collaborate with monsters.