Comment by bringtheaction | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bringtheaction | Hacker News Reader

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The license is MIT but not MIT. It’s the MIT license with two additional conditions imposed;

- The one you mentioned about citation.

- “The Software is not used by, in cooperation with, or on behalf of any armed forces, intelligence agencies, reconnaissance agencies, defense agencies, offense agencies or any supplier, contractor, or research associated.”

https://github.com/seemoo-lab/mobisys2018_nexmon_software_de...

Even just the one about citation is problematic but IMO the condition about armed forces and so on is even worse. I kind of see where they are coming from but I wish people just used standard MIT and acknowledged that yes your software might end up being used for something that you do not agree with morally.

And if they are going to impose such restrictions, why stop there? Why not also say that you cannot use the software to transmit for example child pornography? And how about saying that you cannot use it to spread false information, fake news etc?

I would be exaggerating, but not much, if I were to say that as soon as you introduce one or more moral restrictions into a software license, you are implicitly saying that any moral concern not mentioned is ok.

How about terrorism? They didn’t say anything about terrorism so I guess using their software for terror is fine as long as the terrorists are not an “armed force”, an intelligence agency etc.

Technology has infitinite uses, a whole host of which are good, probably as many that are bad, and likewise an uncountable amount of uses that are either neither or both, and very many that will be one thing for some people and the other for other people.

It should in my opinion not be the job of a software license to pass moral judgement. Either you release your software for anyone to use for any purpose under the terms of an unmodified license accepted by the community or you might as well not bother trying to be open source at all.

> Why not also say that you cannot use the software to transmit for example child pornography?

Because it's already illegal, so the point would be a noop. On the other hand, contracting for the army is legal and one of the places where licenses may be reviewed/enforced internally.

Same for terrorism. (Also, why would terrorists respect the license)

But as parent said, "Technology has infitinite uses", so what about the other infinite uses?

Well I guess you can divide them in illegal uses (license does not matter) and legal uses (license could matter). I guess from all the legal uses, the authors disliked military etc. use enough to exclude it. Their choice.

Excellent points. I would add this points to the broader issue of "license proliferation" [1] which is a total headache for the lawyers to sort out and as wikipedia describes "affects the whole FOSS ecosystem negatively by the burden of increasingly complex license selection, license interaction, and license compatibility considerations". And it making potential contributors hesitant about even using their project.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_proliferation

"It should in my opinion not be the job of a software license to pass moral judgement."

The MIT licence doesn't prohibit you from rewriting it and changing it to something else and the community isn't a monolith.

A lot of people don't want any of their work associated with military purposes. If someone wants to use the code but falls foul of the licence then they should just look elsewhere.

>Why not also say that you cannot use the software to transmit for example child pornography?

Because that is illegal. They excluded legal use cases, and as far as I'm concerned excluding uses for military reasons is all right.

It's a good restriction. Why? Because the author made it that way. Who are we to judge? That is the point of a license.

I applaud them for taking these things into consideration, and trying to fight the bad forces in the universe.

Is this sarcasm?

Is this sarcasm?

Is this sarcasm?

> It should in my opinion not be the job of a software license to pass moral judgement.

With the same logic it can be argued that is not your job to decide what a software license is for.

Instead, it's the author prerogative to release software with any license they can think of.

It's up to distributions, other developers and users to decide what to do with it.

Most distributions will not package and distribute software under licenses that create gray areas and are difficult to enforce - not because of moral judgments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guideline...

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