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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
In our increasingly politicized world, it has become popular to chant "all software is political." Software builds the systems that free or constrain us, the thinking goes, and so we should withhold it from bad people. This is the thinking that has led Microsoft employees and others to decry contracts tech companies have with ICE (US Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement), insisting that their software only be sold to people they like.
[...] Over the years we as an open source community have experimented with all sorts of stupid ideas, like efforts to block anyone from using code for commercial purposes unless they pay. Each time, we've realized that as good a goal as it is for developers to get paid, for example, the destruction caused by closing off the code to uses we don't like ends up ruining the foundations upon which open source rests.
This is dramatically more important, however, when it comes to attempts to politicize open source software.
As developer Chris Cordle stated, "Nobody wins" and the "whole idea [undergirding open source] dies" ... "if an author arbitrarily picks and chooses who can and can't use it based on whoever Twittersphere is mad at this week." It doesn't matter if there is tremendous cause for that anger. Open source dies when it becomes politicized.
Source: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-politicizing-open-source-is-a-terrible-idea/
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:50PM
I think it's not really about the license, it's about the descriptors.
If you discriminate, it is no longer "open source" or "free software" by definition. You can add such terms to another license if you wish, that's not really the issue, it's just that the license then ceases to be something which you can legitimately describe in those terms.
So it's not that you need a new license; what you need is a new way to categorize such licenses. Call it "visible source" perhaps -- anyone can view the code, but it's not fully open. Not that such linguistic games really matter in the end...