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Activism through open source. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi all,

Before write what I am about to write, I would like to be clear that this is a very controversial topic and, for the eyes of many of you, this will be even silly.

I also know that open source means "open for everyone", and any conditional to that automatically makes a piece of software non-open source.

I really feel pissed off to see such effort for brilliant people from open source community being used for terrible things. So I started to nurture the idea of a license that would forbid the usage of a project by totalitarian governments, including its department and contractors, military forces of any country, certain entities like radical political parties, etc. Basically limiting the usage of those projects to any activity promoting human suffering.

Do you guys think that this is utopic? Does it really hurt the essence of open source? Do you think in the same way about this, and if yes, how do you cope with that?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

While this seems very optimistic, maybe even utopic to me, I think you should do it anyway. If it stops even one party from doing something malicious, it's better than not having the license at all. I don't know if it'll be worth your time in the end, but might you might as well try!