software licensing meta
If you're going to argue that the concept of "open-source" should introduce ethical constraints - which I *morally* can agree with - then you also need to be able to find a universal definition of "ethical" that sufficiently many people can agree with.
And when I say "need", I mean that this is a hard requirement to make the concept work legally, which is what open-source licenses are (unfortunately) exclusively about.
You can't just pick a particular set of ethics that *you* like and argue that that's what "open-source" should mean. I mean, you can, but there's approximately zero chance of that working out in practice and catching on, because there's always going to be *something* that others disagree with.
If all this sounds infeasible to resolve, consider that perhaps a software license is not the ideal place for ethical constraints...
software licensing meta
@joepie91 the trouble is though, how do you set ethical constraints on your project in a way that doesn't require someone basically hand-checking and manually approving every single contributor and/or project building on top of yours?
software licensing meta
@hazelnot Mainly by making the project unappealing to unethical actors, in its purpose/functionality/community/etc.
What often happens is that people build an "open-source alternative" of something that's an almost direct copy of some corporate thing *and its design choices* which would have been optimized for corporate use. Not doing that (see eg. GoToSocial) is a very big step towards avoiding this problem.
