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Should open source sniff the geopolitical wind and ban itself in China and Russia?
In 2022, information technology collided with geopolitics like never before. After Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, many nations decided that Vladimir Putin's regime and populace should be denied access to technology and even to services from the companies that make and wield it.
The USA, meanwhile, extended its restrictions on technology exports to China, citing its belligerence and repression of human rights.
[...] Which got me wondering: should open source contributors, and the organizations that facilitate their work, consider the positions their governments adopt? Should they be concerned that their efforts are being used for nefarious purposes? Might they be restrained from doing so? If they did want to limit distribution, how would that even work, license wise?
[...] The US government, however, is in no doubt that open source projects can and should be subject to its sanctions: in August 2022 the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added a tool called "Tornado Cash" to its Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List (SDN list), a document that names entities with which US citizens are not permitted to do business.
[...] Open source advocate Coraline Ada Ehmke in 2020 delivered a speech titled: The Rising Ethical Storm In Open Source [webm].
In the speech, she opined: "Open source software today is playing a critical role in mass surveillance, anti-immigrant violence, protester suppression, racially biased policing and the development and use of cruel and inhumane weapons."
"And open source's complicity isn't a bug. It's a feature," she added. "This is actually by design. The open source definition allows for use of software for any purpose including specifically for evil."
Ada Ehmke went on to argue that open source developers cannot ignore their social responsibilities.
"I believe that as technologists we have a moral imperative to prevent our work from being used to harm others," she said.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bloodnok on Wednesday January 04, @11:33PM (1 child)
As a developer of free software it is not my place to determine who uses it or how it is used. Its is free for goodness sake.
If we want to try to limit how our software is used, then why limit it to China and Russia. I'm not particularly fond of the GOP, so should I put a clause in preventing them from using it? How about hedge fund managers? Or weapons companies? Or advertisers? Or social media companies? Or anyone with a high net worth who pays less tax than I do?
If I wanted a full time job of trying to figure out who could use my software, I suppose I could try to write a license that achieves it, but it wouldn't be a free software license. And how the hell would I enforce it? It's not like I could audit every politician or advertising company.
Repressive regimes are in any case not going to concern themselves with the legal niceties of licenses. If something I have written is going to be useful to them, the only way I am going to keep it out of their hands is to not publish it in the first place. And really, who does that help?
Let the diplomats deal with geopolitics. Let ordinary people choose whether or not they buy from those regimes. Put effort into persuading politicians and the general public to boycott and sanction the bastards. But trying to use free software licenses as a tool for this is madness.
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The Major
(Score: 2) by TrentDavey on Thursday January 05, @12:33AM
In this case "It is free for badness sake".