Did you have a look on ethical licenses? For example, Coraline Ada Hemke who created the Contributor Covenant (famous code of conduct) started few years ago the Organisation for Ethical Source promoting “ethical” licenses defined by seven principles.

So in fact this third family of licenses is not open source nor free (as defined by OSI and FSF), nevertheless I feel some needs or willings in your side to go, let’s say, “one step further”.

In ethical licenses you can find for example 999 ICU, ACAB, Anti-Capitalist, Peer Production, Hippocratic or some BSD 3-Clause variants about nuclear topics.

You can also have a look on that slidedeck (in French, sorry).

Projects like Bitcoin is what's going to fix these countries, not a license.

Licenses don't stop bombs. In general, informational freedoms always benefits the stronger actor, because they already have the means to exploit the information better than other actors. Legal restrictions are just a bump in the road if what you produced is really really valuable for a corporation or a state entity: they can reimplement it, exploiting the design and "trial-and-error" work embedded in whatever you produced, or they can simply ignore licenses because nobody is going to ask the Israeli's military to respect a license when they are slaughtering civilians.

Social problems never have technical solutions.

If you want to make software that is not captured by state or corporate power, you must create software that is incompatible with whatever they need to do. Embed a social logic that is worthless to their system but useful to our system. Anything else is eventually going to be captured. There's a lot of literature on anti-capture design, and some of it manages to rise above the purely techno-optimist logic and provide something useful.

Much better to add features to your software that make it unusable in totalitarian situations.

For example

• if you're building a reddit clone, make each subreddit elect their moderators every few months.
• Maybe ask How fat is Kim Jon Un during installation.
• Display the text "Taiwan is not a part of China" in the status bar, randomly

...and so on. The possibilities are endless.

For what it's worth, there's an FSF article that addresses this:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freedom-to-run.html

Whether it's persuasive is of course up to you to decide ;).

Government can take all source code and use it for their own secretive proprietary. If a court tells the government to release the source code, who can enforce the court order against the government since government can eliminate all lfunding and shutdown departments?

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?

I do think it's utopian and I can't see it being effective, but you do raise a good question: "Does it really hurt the essence of open source?"

I see open source through a pragmatic lens, not some untouchable liberalist moral right. I'm not the kind of person who says "We should hand power over to the fascists since they did win the vote this time", or "Nazis have a legal right to be here, stop harassing them!". Helping people in reality is more important than trying to implement abstract ideals consistently. So, when push comes to shove, I don't really care about the essence of open source. One could claim that copyleft (e.g. GPL, CC-SA) violates the liberty of companies to use code freely. Yes, it does violate their liberties, but that's a good thing. That's the whole point, in fact. It's a pragmatic compromise away from some abstract ultimate freedom, making it something that actually empowers us and avoids helping those exploiting us as much. And you've taken a similar theme - while I disagree with some of the entities you've chosen, I agree with your attitude. The essence of open source isn't real, it can't help us.

It would require being couched in some kind of international law, and there really isn't one that applies to all countries

How do you define totalitarian governments in an actionable way? The license is a legal document.

And what if the shitty government doesn't give a shit about your license because it's shitty?

What if excluding any group of people in this way is actually illegal?

That said, lots of licenses exist, e.g. non-commercial ones. Check them all out, don't write a new one.

Who would enforce it

I don't want to discourage you, so go for it, it may be fun and you may learn some things or at least think on difficult topics like:

How do you measure human suffering?

How do you deal with extremists that truly believe their cause?

And maybe most interesting what if the radicals are not wrong? (Talking about topics like climate change or overthrowing oppressive regimes)

If this can give you hope I cope by knowing that open source at least sometimes levels the field for the disadvantaged. Like the situation with Deepseek and openAI

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!

I think one has to cope with it the same way the inventor of the ice pick had to cope with Walter Jackson Freeman II. You can't really control what people do with your tools. If you think someone actively destroying lives will bend to the whims of a license, that's cool. I wish I had that level of optimism. Right now it's still pulling teeth to get companies to respect GPLv3.