Restricting software use to only people approved by the creators is a terrible idea. Society has to operate with some level of trust that even people we disagree with, using methods we don't approve of, have the potential to improve the world. Otherwise the situation will get worse.
Also, I think a person has a mortal obligation to allow that their political position is at least partially flawed.
It cuts many ways.
(1) discriminating against marginalized communities
What does this mean? I bet I could get several different answers. Old people are marginalized by agism in tech, does this mean tech companies can't use this? How would they prove they don't marginalize old people?
(2) building tools that disingenuously manipulate public opinion
Ditto. To me this means no political party or marketing/advertising department can use this. Probably most news outlets as well.
(3) building tools of mass surveillance and prediction to repress the rights of people
Rights defined by whom? US Constitution? Right not to be offended? Rights granted by the Taliban or ISIS? Communist China?
(4) building tools that control weapons, including tools that automate the deployment, operation, and targeting of weapons.
I think most people can get on board with this one, unless we were attacked in earnest by a strong military foe.
All use of weapons and surveillance is abusive, so what you are saying "we" (who?) want is not something that I find reasonable.
No matter what you think, the authors might disagree, so you have no way of using the software in anything related to it. Worse yet, this can quickly change - the system you built that uses this software in the background might be totally fine to watch a womans shelter, but the license could be pulled any minute because the authors dislike that you also sold your product to a normal prison.
Why? I mean, don't you believe you have a say on who you grant permission to use your intellectual property?
> Also, I think a person has a mortal obligation to allow that their political position is at least partially flawed.
This assertion makes no sense. You should not be forced to help advance anyone's goals when they are diametrically opposite to what you believe in and can be outright hostile towards you and your loved ones.
If the author of some software has a general good-faith position that others should use their software, then the conditions they associate with that software fall on a continuum from "reasonable to "unreasonable".
The MIT license is at the reasonable end. Saying "give me ten million dollars for this ROT13 algorithm" is at the unreasonable end.
When the person you replied to said:
> They can, which doesn't mean they should.
I think they were saying they personally considered the terms of the license at the "unreasonable" end. I don't disagree- saying "you can use this for now, but have to stop immediately if I or anyone I might sell this to say so" seems at least borderline unreasonable.
It certainly isn't "free software", though being wrapped in what is otherwise the Blue Oak license they're kind of hiding their non-free-ness. I think this is where I mostly take issue- it feels like the project is attempting to portray itself as a free software project, when it is not.
The "good-faith position" weasel words only serve to try to fabricate and cast doubt on the morality of a decision on how your work can and should be used, and only because you find it inconvenient. For some reason, your argument completely eliminates the author from the decision process. Do you find that to be fair or in good faith?
Meanwhile, I never saw anyone attack musicians based on "morality" for refusing to authorize the use of their work by specific politicians or specific election campaigns, even when authors only claim personal preferences or even prefering other candidates.
As someone reading through this: Yes. I find that argument both reasonable and fair.
The author is free to ask for compensation up front in exchange for the tool they've built. They can also just simply refuse to license it in the first place.
But a license that I can violate if the author simply changes their mind is quicksand: Nothing of value can be built on it, because it might sink at ANY POINT.
It's literally unusable as a tool.
Where I personally draw the line is something being presented as a "general purpose tool", versus as an exclusive work.
When Stuart Stemple created a pink pigment and granted license to use it to "everyone except Anish Kapoor", I thought it was a great artistic statement, but as a practical matter I think it's unreasonable.
It's the difference between a whitelist and a blacklist. Saying "you can use this if you meet these criteria (e.g. having no criteria, having paid me money, etc)" is okay, but saying "everyone can use this EXCEPT if I decide I don't want you too" is not. In my opinion.
Isn't it "how they sell it" instead of "how they use it"?
Edit: Also, "how" doesn't necessarily mean "what for".
And way back then - when courts where a thing, but a broad tax base was not, and in any case society didn't have the kind of near-instant communication networks available now - that might even have made sense.
I agree with your intention, but there's a balance to be struck between individual contributions and those of wider society.
The creators are not simply the outcome of a populated space but of its navigation, through orientation, implying the sought, the accepted and the refused. Their «fruit» is produced accordingly - and not just "owing to society", but also "in spite of it" - and represents an intention, which is conditional to the product itself.
Contextually: the point is more like "we do not accept that these springs we build can be used in landmines". It ecompasses the literal point, yet it is different - at least, it refuses the purpose, not the person.
Purpose and person are hard to separate too. Like if you will sell cakes to anyone, except that nobody will be given a cake if it's for a gay wedding.
Marginalised communities are not protected by documents that claim to protect marginalised communities. Fat lot of good documents have ever done. What protects marginalised communities is actual tolerance of differing opinions, and actual freedom. Ditto what protects us from surveillance. Fat lot of good all the paper protections against surveillance have done. Look at what America has built! Let alone China. Once again, the problem is a knee-jerk overreaction and paranoia in the ruling class when the correct answer is tolerance. Ditto weapons. Did Afghanistan benefit from code of conducts? No, what it needed was a bulkwork of people who said "lets really stretch ourselves not to hurt people who dislike us" at a critical moment.
This license won't do what it claims. Best case, it is GPL+Fluff. Worst case, it becomes an exclusionary political tool. Ironically, it is likely that it will be wielded against marginalised communities.
It really is not. Unbounded tolerance is how free and open societies commit suicide and succumb to authoritarian regimes where intolerance is the norm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
> If they want to license their software however then good luck to them, but nonetheless attempting to encode illiberal political beliefs into a software license is the wrong direction. The GPL is exactly the right approach.
You're just asserting that refusing to help out authoritarian and outright xenophobic political movements further their goals "is the wrong approach" without any rationale or insight or argument at all.
Meanwhile, you're citing the GPL which is a highly political license.
And to allow discriminating against "wrong" opinions is how intolerance becomes the norm.
Do you feel that plotting to overthrow a democracy to install a totalitarian despot while discussing political assassinations is a grey area that's up for debate whether it's "wrong" or indeed undoubtedly wrong?
I mean, considering how this very same political group killed police officers during their coup attempt, where do you personally draw the line on murder?
Now, of course, I see the problem of letting people freely talk about killing people, overthrowing the government or running concentration camps. But forbidding this kind of speech is not going to prevent it if the pull is strong enough; even worse, it's going to strengthen their narrative about oppression. Instead, it should be possible to openly discuss why this is wrong. To understand why someone has an opinion and showing him why that trade-off is not worth it is far better than trying to forbid even thinking about it.
Now, I know that our action prevention might need some form of surveillance to prevent radical groups from taking actions and, at its worst, might fail to prevent some unnecessary violence. In my opinion, though, we can have much more freedom and maybe even prevent more people from radicalizing than by trying to censor wrong thoughts.
> It really is not. Unbounded tolerance is how free and open societies commit suicide and succumb to authoritarian regimes where intolerance is the norm.
This is a non sequitur. GP placed a bound on tolerance.
> You're just asserting that refusing to help out authoritarian and outright xenophobic political movements further their goals "is the wrong approach" without any rationale or insight or argument at all.
GP can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think he has asserted anything of the kind. In fact, I suspect he's somewhat opposed to the same, since he's opposed to "illiberal political beliefs" which are themselves quite aligned with "xenophobic political movements".
In any case, I think you've entirely missed the pragmatic points of the GP's post, which is that such illiberal policies are, throughout history, used against the marginalized peoples they are ostensibly intended to protect. Given your previous statement about unbounded tolerance, it feels like you should be in agreement with the GP on this point; unless you're saying we should just skip the tolerance and go straight to intolerance.
Actually, I believe everything works out if everyone is intolerant of intolerance. That would include suicide bombers.
People need to stop imposing on others.
What would you think would work if an authoritarian political movement plagued with xenophobia wants to use your work as a key tool to start imposing on tolerant people?
What do you mean? Which definition of 'liberal' are you using?
That licence is one shard about opinion (debatable instancing of «marginalized») and fundamentally about use.
Funny you mention that page, because before posting the question «Which definition of 'liberal' are you using» I went to that very page to try to try and find an interpretation that fit the context. But nothing answered it clearly. So, that remains insufficient.
If the use of 'liberal' was meant to refer to the defence of freedom of speech, there exist a problem in the discrimination between "speech" as intended in the formula and «manipulat[ion]» as written in that licence. But was that the idea? We should not be here to guess.
* Anti-democratic (in that they privilege the copyright holders political views)
* Anti-secular/anti-religious-freedom (in that they privilege the copyright holders values and would likely exclude people based on religious values in conflict with the CoC).
* Anti-free-speech (in that they would deny access to their work based on what people say).
* Anti-market economy (in that they aren't providing a tool/service to anyone equally based on a free market).
Which isn't to say they're bad people or anything, liberalism isn't the be-all and end-all. But the GPL is a neat embodiment of some very good ideas from the liberal tradition and this ml5js library license is much less liberal than the GPL. And also worse.
Indeed so, they have that right.
I personally wouldn't consider using code licensed like this, because even if I 100% agreed with the CoC and Steering Committee, both might change over time (the CoC says "We expect the Code of Conduct to be a living document") and I have no idea who'll be on the Steering Committee in 5-10 years time, and whoever it is will be able to pull the rug from under my feet at a whim.
A bit like paying $100 for some software but a year later being told they now think you should pay $5000.
Atlassian has a patent on that business process.
Yeah, and that's not called free software, Free Software is about empowering end users, not the creator.
Whether they're under a moral or legal obligation depends on the moral code (not the same across people in the same country, much less in different countries) and the legal code.
For example, if they had a condition that Women, Gays, Jews or Blacks should not use it? Can they "put any conditions they please" including the above? What would you say about this "morally"? I know what most would say: that they have a moral obligation to not put such a condition.
And it would not be legal either, in many jurisdictions at least.
So what? Why does it matter what they think?
Like all things intellectual property rights, the copyright's moral rights would have to be determined by a court of law in the copyright holder's legal jurisdiction.
Everyone is free to use the software. If a project is found to be in violation of the Code of Conduct (e.g. discriminating against marginalized communities, manipulating public opinion, automating weapons) than the community developing the software takes steps to remedy the problem with the reported violator, or the project falls out of compliance with the license.
I agree with your hesitance and apprehension of how it could could go wrong. There is significant responsibility in interpretation and governance, presumably (though in some cases, it could be pretty clear — like with weapons.). And in cases with consequences related to violence and weapons and oppression, it also seems like a step in the right direction.
In the context of some software, this may not fit or be useful. In other libraries, it could also be incredibly important and impactful.
It also requires stepping out of our innocence. It requires accepting responsibility for interpretation, decision-making, and governance — and that sometimes, some of our decisions may not be right. Sometimes, we have to make decisions even when the answers aren't clear. This is part of our personal lives, being in families, being in communities, being in companies. It's just decision-making at the end of the day — call it what you want (e.g. governance, licensing, restricting). Why shouldn't that kind of decisionmaking and responsibility be part of software and the communities building software — especially given its growing impact on the world around us?
> Society has to operate with some level of trust that even people we disagree with
This is well said. I would just note that ml5.js's approach leaves room for disagreement, and a pathway to hear and understand and reconcile disagreement, before any action is taken. The devil is in implementation — though it does seem wise, and the community has likely thought through and accounted for more of the problems than we have. They probably had discussions just like this, actually, with perspectives just like ours.
If mastodon had this in the code of conduct they’d not be able to use their own software haha. They banned Gab and arguably Trump has a marginalized base and as far as I’m aware never advocated for violence (if you believe the contrary, note that trump could have been arrested but hasn’t)
https://mastodon.social/about/more
Some of Trump's base is marginalized on one intersection or another, but they support ideologies and an ideologue that are not marginalized by any defensible definition.
The rest of your reply disagrees with your first sentence. It seems that only the people who share ml5.js values are allowed to use the software. There's no problem with that, but they should be clear about it. They should also state clearly that ml5.js is not free or open source software, as its license violates the first principle of Free Software:
> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
And the similar principle in the OSI definition of Open Source
> No discrimination against fields of endeavor: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Any can use the software only for purposes in line with ml5.js values.
So everyone is free to use the software, just not for all the purposes that any particular person might choose. It's something like a bar with a "no racist language" sign: anyone can use the bar, they just have to abide by the rules, and if they chose not to, they can find another bar.
There are 2 caveats to that:
1. they can change their values at any time
2. they can decide at their sole discretion that your use isn't in line with their values, and you have no recourse.
> It's something like a bar with a "no racist language" sign: anyone can use the bar
The difference is that one wouldn't use the bar as a platform to build a business on, whereas one might build a business on software.
Hitler literally saved puppies. He was a forerunner of animal rights. I don't know about the relationship between Trump and puppies but real people are more nuanced than a D&D alignment chart, and even despicable people can do good.
Can a weapon manufacturing company use ml5.js ?
There are 2 issues:
1. the CoC is a "living document" which is Silicon valley speak for "we're making it up as we go along" (see also HTML5). It can change at any time.
2. The membership of the Steering Committee can change over time (and they can also change the CoC). What if in 5-10 years time I have built a successful business on this software, and the SC is taken over by employees of a rival company that then denies me use of it. As far as I can tell, I am shafted with no recourse.
For this reason I would never use any software licensed like this to do anything serious, nor would I contribute to any software licensed like this.
Why do you think that would be the case? If the license doesn't achieve what the creator wanted, then they can just change it. It's not up to the greater community to decide what the best license is for other peoples projects.
It sounds like you have your own idea of what will "improve the world" and want other people to license their work to match with it.
No, you can't "just change it" if you have external contributors and you allow them to keep ownership of their contributions (the default). Many people object to CLAs on philosophical reasons and will refuse to sign them.
Now your "just change it" is a 6-12 months effort trying to chase down every single contributor and nitpicking your license change until everyone is happy, or rewriting a bunch of code due to licensing issues.
These above scenarios amount to handing criminals and bad actors powerful technological tools which allow them to increase harms done to society. This is a software company's choice, there is no law that states a company must provide its software to whomever, even if they have evil intent.
No, but there's a terrible slippery slope to have the creator able to make value judgments about uses of the software after the software is adopted and exert power over the users this way.
> To host child pornography sharing?
I think it's a bit of hyperbole once we're extending this value judgment to conduct that is already otherwise illegal. Is someone breaking the law to host child pornography and facing criminal charges going to be deterred by the possibility of civil damages from license noncompliance?
Of course it’s only a lie when your in-group defines it as such.
I recall at the beginning of the pandemic the CDC and surgeon general saying “masks weren’t necessary” and that “the lab leak theory is a conspiracy”. Of course both proved to be Noble Lies put out by the institutions.
I know it’s comforting to think of the world in terms of good/evil and truth/lies, but unfortunately it’s a messy complicated world and things are not as clear cut as we’d like.
I imagine an autonomous sentry-turret (Half-Life, Portal, etc) comes to mind. Obviously that’s right-out.
But what about airsoft or paintball? Those are recreational activities, but in some jurisdictions their respective “guns” can be legally considered weapons because they can still do serious bodily harm - as well as intimidate.
———
Another example is “Windows for Warships”: you could build this software for that, no? So, is a warship a weapon? Naval frigate? Merchant marine vessel that carries small-arms for self-defense? At what point does arbitrary hardware attached to the computer running this software become a “weapon” or not?
I’m not a rights-absolutist - I just think when writing a license with restrictions that are going to be open to interpretation get a gosh-darned lawyer involved and be as specific as possible, and then some. You don’t want a project getting bogged-down by internet nerds complaining about stuff like this. Not least an army of trolls who will spam your inbox with hair-splitting questions about the classification of firearms technology to gleefully waste your time. (“it’s not an ‘assault rifle’, it’s a ‘scary looking semi-automatic AR-15’”, “bump-stocks aren’t automatics lololol”, etc)
If activists can define "infrastructure" as social programs, they can define "weaponry" as end-to-end encryption, cryptocurrency, or just websites that express perspectives that they dislike. We all lose when people play language games like this.
Possibly. If the list of restrictions is ill-defined and ever-changing then it opens up a can of worms, which in practise means no-one will use the software.
Seems reasonable until you do something unrelated to offend the licensor and they decide to leverage a very loose definition of weaponry/munitions against you. For example, have a look at what is consider munitions for the purpose of export controls in the USA, and consider what additional items have been regulated as munitions in the past:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Munitions_List
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
This is emphatically wrong. For at least two to three generations society has operated with a large part of it understanding that another large part of it is unethical and wrong (i.e. conscientious objectors and folks that sympathise but cannot bring up the courage to do so). If being so understanding is what made the world better, then 1930 would truly have been a golden age.
There is nothing wrong with making, let's say, a licence that prohibits the use of its adhered product for activities such as the development of nuclear weapons.
The road to hell ... something something ... good intentions.
Who defines what 'marginalization of people' means (a strange term if you really think about it), and why would you think they would get that definition right?
The software creators, which seems very reasonable to me. This isn't some arbitrary judge deeming what is marginalizing or not. This is the creators of the software saying "We don't want to build something that complete dickweeds can use for evil."
Don't like their definition of "dickweeds" or "evil"? Fine, build your own shit then.
I understand that people want to look at this like a kind of slippery slope (if you can define one kind of restriction, why not define another and another - until you have closed source software by any other name) - but just because arbitrary restrictions mean something isn't colloquially "open" doesn't mean that certain specific restrictions might not still reasonably be compatible with something described as "open".
Certainly we should not accept a formalized definition of any language term like this; i.e. just because an OSI or other group wishes to claim the definition of open source doesn't mean we all need to use that definition. Specifically, let's not accept https://opensource.org/docs/osd as a kind of gospel truth. It's a fine initiative, but not necessarily the only possible one.
I'm not convinced that allowing a few restrictions would be a great idea, but then again, I'm also sure it would be dramatically different from the status quo, nor that is makes sense to no longer call such software open source.
On top of that, even if all the groups shared the same views you’d still need to suddenly spend a lot of time understanding each group before you used their software, and you’d need to continue to keep an eye on their views to ensure you are complying.
Thanks but I will stick to the plain old open source licenses like ISC, MIT, GPL, and Apache.
> The software creators
I don't understand how that could work. Would "marginalizing people" have any concrete legal definition at all or would it literally be anything the creator decides now or in the future?
Software creator says I'm marginalizing people, I deny it and refuse to stop using their library. How would a court sort that out?
Sure. Do what you want but don't try to claim that this is a good license. It's the opposite of a good license. It's ambiguous, capricious, and arbitrary.
That could be applied to *anything*, it doesn't have any substance.
>(Do Not)Use ml5.js to build tools that discriminate against marginalized communities
That could be better put as
>(Do Not)Use ml5.js to build tools that discriminate
By adding in "marginalized communities", they are creating loopholes. Some discrimination is good, as long as it is to people we don't like. Is discrimination against Chinese allowed? In the big picture, Chinese are the majority of the world population.
No, they are roughly 1/5th of it.
Population by Country China 18.47% India 17.70% USA 4.25%
I could take your argument and use it to say that Christians are not the majority even though they are 31.11% if looking at the religious population size.
By mostly my point was to highlight that you can spin and manipulate the CoC however you want, thus leaving the CoC Steering Committee either over worked trying to enforce the CoC of using selective enforcement where they only go after "bad" people.
Also: >(Do Not)Use ml5.js to build tools to disingenuously manipulate public opinion
Would ingenuous manipulation be acceptable? https://www.wordnik.com/words/ingenuous adjective Of honorable extraction; freeborn; noble.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is fairness and justice I fear.
Isn't that the whole point of author's rights/intellectual property in general and software licenses in particular?
No, not really. Author's rights and intellectual property are not a price tag on an open market. They establish that the author has exclusive rights over his own work, and thus anyone who is interested in accessing said work needs explicit authorization from the author and covering explicitly the intender use. You don't just press a button and get a license that the author did not specified.
... Generally called a monopoly, yes. (The original Copyright Act 1710 had a hard upper limit of 28 years on the duration, the modern near-eternal copyright is a recent thing; patents are around 20 years max even today, or using the LAME codec would still be illegal.)
While I don’t think I called it a price tag (if anything, it’s only the right to set one if desired), note that the practice of copyright assignment (required among others by most publishers, both of books and of periodicals) precisely amounts to selling this exclusivity at some sort of market-determined price. The Berne Convention’s inalienable “moral rights”, from what I understand, were intended exactly to limit the scope of this so that the author could at least receive acknowledgement even if they chose or were forced to give up any and all material benefits or other control over their creation.
... I’m not sure I entirely understand what you wanted to say, sorry, so this reply might be missing the point.
No, it really is not and this assertion makes absolutely no sense at all. Keep in mind that a monopoly refers to a single company or person selling something in a market being the only supplier of said thing. As it is easy to understand, monopolies have absolutely zero to do with this. This is a fundamental author's rights issue, where the author of any intellectual work has the right to decide who and how is allowed to use his own work, whether or not there is any sort of transaction or compensation.
You're talking about an entity that has a monopoly (generally in a market). Perhaps confusingly, monopoly is also the word we use to describe such an entity.