about ethical licenses, moderately hot take
I think they're a terrible idea, specifically the "license" part. I think the 'ethical constraints' part is good (if anything, a lot of ethical licenses don't go far enough IMO!), but a license is the wrong tool for this.
Why? Two reasons:
1. Licenses are *very fundamentally* a part of the copyright system. The same copyright system that systematically advantages exactly the parties you want to prevent from using your thing, against whom it is notoriously difficult to get a ruling.
Licenses are a copyright mechanism. Copyright serves the wealthy and the powerful, not the marginalized. FOSS licenses are a necessary workaround to mitigate the harms, but crucially they are not and can never be an effective enforcement tool. It's not how the power dynamics work.
2. License conflicts are a huge problem. Ethics are as varied as favourite foods, and that's a *good* thing, but it's incompatible with one of the desirable properties of public licenses, namely consistency and interoperability.
Things are not built in a vacuum. They are built on other people's work, which is built on yet other people's work, and so on. As you stack more and more pieces onto each other whose licenses all forbid subtly different things, you eventually end up with something no one can use due to the non-overlapping exclusions.
This makes any projects of serious scale (say, those trying to build a stateless society and its infrastructure...) pretty much guaranteed to paint themselves into a corner due to the license constraints piling up, and that is probably not what you were trying to achieve with your license choice.
You should absolutely enforce ethical constraints in your project, but if your goal is to sabotage powerful actors, there are much more effective solutions that don't have these problems - like making it abundantly clear that they are not welcome in the community, they will not receive support, their bugtickets will not be handled, and their needs will not be designed for.
The kind of organizations that people usually try to keep out with ethical licenses - corporations, militaries, etc. - are ultimately looking to exploit free labour (*especially* support-wise), and if you deny them that, their interest will wane. You don't really need a license for that, especially if you couldn't afford to sue anyway.
about ethical licenses, moderately hot take
@shine @gotosocial Very much in favour of that sort of approach, yep
about ethical licenses, moderately hot take
@joepie91 @gotosocial Thanks for that post. I was really considering such licenses for my projects and as much as it sounds like a great idea at the beginning, you are right. It's a bit more involved than just slapping a license and thinking the work is done, but ultimately, the only detrimental effect those have is against people who won't touch a "sjw / project", which can be easily substituted by having CoC and few queer flags in Readme.
And as for license, corporates that actually care about licenses won't touch anything copyleft.
about ethical licenses, moderately hot take
@joepie91 That quite reminds me how @gotosocial handles things. Any time there is a request from a place that goes against project ethics, they shut it down without mercy.