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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[–] pylapp@programming.dev 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Did you have a look on ethical licenses? For example, Coraline Ada Hemke who created the Contributor Covenant (famous code of conduct) started few years ago the Organisation for Ethical Source promoting “ethical” licenses defined by seven principles.

So in fact this third family of licenses is not open source nor free (as defined by OSI and FSF), nevertheless I feel some needs or willings in your side to go, let’s say, “one step further”.

In ethical licenses you can find for example 999 ICU, ACAB, Anti-Capitalist, Peer Production, Hippocratic or some BSD 3-Clause variants about nuclear topics.

You can also have a look on that slidedeck (in French, sorry).