My conception of the Open Source movement is that it was basically forked off of the Free Software Movement by a bunch of Libertarians (as in United States Libertarian Party with a capital “L”, not anarchism). (Eric Raymond has never been shy about going on about how the free market is the solution to every problem anyone has ever had. And Bruce Parens is the one who has been doing the whole “Post-Open Source” thing that has a bunch of rules about adding more capitalism to Open Source.)
And on that basis, it feels to me like the Open Source movement isn’t really the most likely to sympathize with anti-fascist sentiments.
The FSF, doesn’t strike me as that much more likely to care.
But, maybe Bradley Kuhn and the SFC (and FSFE) might be more inclined to be on board with that idea?
The result couldn’t really be called “Open Source” or “Free Software” (or “F(L)OSS”.) And I kindof doubt any of the organizations involved with the two movements would stick their necks out so far as to certify a license that was like “AGPLv3, except Nazis can fuck off”.
So, maybe a new term is needed. I propose “Hate-Free Software”. As a purposeful play on “Free Software” that makes it pretty clear it’s “Free Software” except for Nazis.
All that said, to make any of this work, there’d have to be a license that did the necessary magic legalese to convince courts to enforce it in the way that’s going to accomplish the goals of the whole movement.
I think I vaguely remember hearing about some almost-FOSS project out there somewhere that used some GPL-based license except with an added restriction that said “except this specific company gets nothing”. IIRC, that provision was legally dicey as to whether it could/would actually be enforced. But I guess that approach might be a place to start researching at least.
However the legalese worked, you know the Nazis would push its boundaries. Like, if the license specifically said “except hate groups”, the Nazis would use the courts to push the agenda that anti-genocide activists are antisemitic.
Theoretically one could make it a non-open license in the sense that the copyright owners individually hand-pick who gets to have the permissive license terms and who can fuck right off, but I probably wouldn’t want to go to the trouble to seek a license to use any software like that for fear they’d yoink my license rights away without notice.
I guess what I’m getting at is that I don’t necessarily disagree with the concept, but the execution isn’t going to be easy.
I think that should stop at Nazis. Like how the seeming paradox of how to have a tollerant society is that you cannot tolerate the intollerant.
My conception of the Open Source movement is that it was basically forked off of the Free Software Movement by a bunch of Libertarians (as in United States Libertarian Party with a capital “L”, not anarchism). (Eric Raymond has never been shy about going on about how the free market is the solution to every problem anyone has ever had. And Bruce Parens is the one who has been doing the whole “Post-Open Source” thing that has a bunch of rules about adding more capitalism to Open Source.)
And on that basis, it feels to me like the Open Source movement isn’t really the most likely to sympathize with anti-fascist sentiments.
The FSF, doesn’t strike me as that much more likely to care.
But, maybe Bradley Kuhn and the SFC (and FSFE) might be more inclined to be on board with that idea?
The result couldn’t really be called “Open Source” or “Free Software” (or “F(L)OSS”.) And I kindof doubt any of the organizations involved with the two movements would stick their necks out so far as to certify a license that was like “AGPLv3, except Nazis can fuck off”.
So, maybe a new term is needed. I propose “Hate-Free Software”. As a purposeful play on “Free Software” that makes it pretty clear it’s “Free Software” except for Nazis.
All that said, to make any of this work, there’d have to be a license that did the necessary magic legalese to convince courts to enforce it in the way that’s going to accomplish the goals of the whole movement.
I think I vaguely remember hearing about some almost-FOSS project out there somewhere that used some GPL-based license except with an added restriction that said “except this specific company gets nothing”. IIRC, that provision was legally dicey as to whether it could/would actually be enforced. But I guess that approach might be a place to start researching at least.
However the legalese worked, you know the Nazis would push its boundaries. Like, if the license specifically said “except hate groups”, the Nazis would use the courts to push the agenda that anti-genocide activists are antisemitic.
Theoretically one could make it a non-open license in the sense that the copyright owners individually hand-pick who gets to have the permissive license terms and who can fuck right off, but I probably wouldn’t want to go to the trouble to seek a license to use any software like that for fear they’d yoink my license rights away without notice.
I guess what I’m getting at is that I don’t necessarily disagree with the concept, but the execution isn’t going to be easy.