Bigotry via Software License

Indeed.

It's a higher level of consciousness to take into account the consequences of your acts and of your work.

Commercial developers just go as far as the money paid by their customers, and don't care what their software is used for.

Some commercial developers restrict some use of their software (but more for their own protection, because they know the limits of the "quality" of their products, than for moral reasons). For example, you're not allowed to use Apple software to develop nuclear power systems.

cf. https://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/MacOSX.htm

    C. Except as and only to the extent permitted in this License and by applicable law, you may not copy, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, modify, or create derivative works of the Apple Software or any part thereof. THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE. 

In addition, corporations under USA jurisdiction must restrict the use of their products to authorised countries only.

If a country feels threatened by another country, it's understandable that it wish to avoid providing this other country with any help that would heighten the thread.

Similarly, if an individual feels threatened by another country or by other individuals, it's understandabel that we wish to avoid providing them with any help, most notably when it's in the form of gratis software.

Of course, this contradicts the ideal of free(dom) software.

But we have to take into account the circumstances, we don't live in an ideal world.

You have also to take into account the fact that you cannot in general control the application of your free software license. Those using BSD or MIT and similar license basically abandon all control on their software use and distribution (or non-distribution).

In the case of GPL, the copyright owner keeps control of the distribution if his software, under the terms of the license (which mandates the derived works authors to distribute the sources along with their derived works).

But in practice, GPL software owners don't have the means to control what corporations in the USA do with their software and whether they respect the terms of the license or not, and even if they detected license violations, they don't have the power to do anything about it. We're counting here more on the self discipline of the potential users of the software than on anything else, and this means that it can be abused easily.

Therefore beyond the restrictions the license may put on the use or users of the software, the questions of the distribution of free(dom) software itself must be considered, in each case.

It's probably better to distribute widely and indiscriminately software whose success is based on network effect. For example, things like GNU or Linux.

But for more specific software, one should ponder whether even its users wouldn't be better served by a more restricted distribution.

In practice, we know that most open source software is not read by a lot of people, and not used by a lot more either anyways.

Distributing the sources of the software you sell to your customers or give to your friend still seems to be a very important act of software freedom. Distributing it to the whole wide world, doesn't seem so important. The GPL itself clearly distringuishes this point: you can use, read and modify a GPL software, keeping your derived work entirely private, as long as you don't distribute it. This covers use of derived work inside some artificial boundaries (one would have to revise the legal definition of "distribution" IANAL), such as corporation, family, and why not friend circles. I think it can be argued that if you got diner at your friends' and install some derived work of some GPL software on his computer, this won't consitute a distribution. And while the GPL spirit would have you give your friend the sources of your derived work, nothing in the terms of that license imposes you to distribute them to the public at large.

The corporations are so greedy that in general they won't be using GPL software as the basis of their products (they may still use it internally, and this is questionable, as we've seen from the scandal of the openssl and bash bugs that remained undetected for decades); so this provides some indirect and implicit limitations on the distribution of GPL software. But we cannot depend on it.

I think the argument should be made for a more direct control, and given the current spirit of free software and the current terms of the GPL family of licenses, which doesn't distinguish human individuals from corporations and political (ie. armed) entities (eg. countries or "rebel" groups), the individual author of powerful tools should definitely consider and explicitely control the distribution of his works, instead of pushing it naively to the whole world.

Now, TreeFinder is not distributed under a free software license (the sources aren't distributed), but the new terms "I do no longer permit the usage of my TREEFINDER software in the following EU countries: [...]" restrict the execution of the software geographically. As a programmer, I understand that a program runs on some computer hardware that is localised geographically; the presence of a human user is optional, and therefore the location of this optional human user cannot be used to determine the geographical location of the "use" of the program. Only the position of the hardware running this program. Therefore, as a French citizen, currently present in France, and currently under the domination of the EU oligarchy, I could install this software on a server located in Cameroon and have it run there, in Africa. Honestly, this doesn't represent much of a restriction, and not even an inconvenience, I already routinely use computers located in different countries.

This restriction is not really effective to advance the goals of the author; the buzz around it does more. (And definitely, the publicity is nice, TreeFinder seems to be a nice program).

One could design better license terms.

To begin with, we would have to distinguish different entities, such as human beings, for-profit corporations, political entities, etc, and classify them on the wanted criteria (is, belongs, helps the oligarchy, or not). A human being who's salaried by a corporation who wants to have immigrants to lower the salary, shall he be discriminated against for working to that corporation? Or shall he be helped in his human endeavour? How will we distinguish use of the software at home, for personal purposes, from a use that would eventually benefit the corporation, and therefore lower his salary (and everybody else's)? We can assume that all employee of corporations making a profit, being willingly exploited and willingly contributing their share of the profit to the oligarchs are parts of the enemy, so they could be distriminated against. The point here is that there is some information available about the relationships between corporations, and with some parts of the political system, and some of those high up individuals, but you might need even more information, eg. about employees, about customers of free lances, etc.

http://theyrule.net/drupal/topics/watching%20them

http://api.littlesis.org/documentation

On the other hand, you may discover that everybody is enslaved and contributing. Why not exclude the Chinese? They definitely contribute to the decadence of Europe thru delocalizations. And why not the Africans who provide cheap minerals to the Chinese factories?

http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis-Cousin...

Already a Godwin that early into the "discussion"?

There is definitely a certain frustration on the author's side (justified or not, I can't tell), but I wouldn't necessarily attribute that to him not having been made rich by his software in particular.

1- his software is not free(dom) software, it's not open source; it is apparently closed-source "freeware".

2- there's the mention of commercial or military use licenses could be obtainable by contacting him directly.

One could argue that this is a defective marketing approach, and that to earn money selling software, you have to actively approach prospects and convince them they need your software.

The statistics on the number of users of most free(dom) software distributed world wide definitely shows it.