NHPL : The No Hate Public License | Hacker News Reader

NHPL : The No Hate Public License

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10 pointsGuiA14 comments

What a horrible plan! I mean, I support the basic idea of not wanting your work to be used by, say, the Westboro group. But how could you possibly define "communication that disparages or discriminates" in any meaningful way? Some cases are obvious (see the above example), but what about someone who's disparaging a repressive government? Last year's Arab Spring protestors wouldn't think that they're being discriminatory or hate-driven, but the local authorities had a different view of the matter. For a (possibly) closer-to-home example, consider the opposing sides of the pro-life/pro-choice debate. Either group would be very likely to accuse the other of disparaging or discriminating against their own "religion, or other characteristic".

Furthermore, some overly-sensitive people interpret anything that doesn't actively support them as opposing them. Who gets/has to decide whether a particular instance of communication "disparages or discriminates": the speaker, the listener, or you?

Also, remember that a license is actually a legal document. Do you really want to have to defend these vague terms in court?

The GNU folks considered such things when crafting the GPL. According to their rationale at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html , the very first requirement of a free software licence (freedom 0) is:

  The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or
  organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall
  job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer
  or any other specific entity. In this freedom, it is the user's purpose that
  matters, not the developer's purpose; you as a user are free to run the program for
  your purposes, and if you distribute it to someone else, she is then free to run it
  for her purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on her.

While many people disagree with the GNU authors on many finer points, this is a pretty fundamental freedom that many or most free software authors support.

Basically, while I sympathize with the motivation, this just can't work in reality. Nor should it! It sets a very bad example of attempting to impose behaviors on end users and that never ends well.

Thanks for the politely written, well argued criticism!

My goal in writing+submitting this was more to ignite interesting conversations like yours rather than to provide a legal document ready to use.

That being said, I have to say that in the light of what you said, I would tend to agree with everything that you said. But it still bothers me that it is possible to use free software for "hate" driven causes.

If a homophobic/xenophobic/etc. group used my work to efficiently promote their ideals, it would bother me on a deep level. I don't think there's a straight solution to that, but I still feel like it's a problem at some level- despite the fact that yes, attempting to impose behaviors on end users is a very slippery slope.

Thanks for taking it in the friendly spirit I intended it. Parts may have come across a little more harshly than I planned, but I meant well. :)

Again, I totally understand the motivation. I'd hate to think that someone was taking the software that I poured so much hard work into and using it to mistreat others! I think that's just something we have to learn to accept. You can use a rifle to shoot a wild animal or assassinate a political opponent. A knife can open a box or hijack an airplane. Virus manipulation can end a disease or end a country. The best you can do is make sure your own motives are good and hope for the best from others.

A solution may be to provide a template, where developers can list explicitly the activities they do not support. You'd still be imposing your morals and beliefs on others, but at least it could be less ambiguous.

This would not be a "free software license" due to the nature of the restrictions, so it would never make it into a distro like Debian for example, but maybe you don't care about that.

EDIT: For this to really work you'd probably have to encourage users of the license to be very explicit and give some examples which don't suffer from the slippery-slope problem.

I had the idea for this when seeing the following website:

http://www.debbiespenditnow.com/

which heavily uses jQuery for blatant racism. As an open source developer, I want a way to prevent people or companies to use my work for such things.

It also reminds me of Gnutella's license, which is modified version of the GPL made to prevent military use.

It might be a bit idealistic, but it's better than nothing. I am also not a lawyer, so feel free to comment/fork the gist.

Well done for seeing a problem and trying to fix it.

But ...

Could I use an NHPL-licenced editor to criticise the Church of Scientology?

Could I use an NHPL-licenced bulletin board system to post content critical of the Westboro Baptists or Wahhabi Islam?

Could I use an NHPL-licenced chat program to criticise National Front neo-NAZIs?

Those are some extreme examples, what about just making fun of dumb people (think http://failblog.org/ on steroids)?

These are some interesting examples. In all of them, we are talking about disparaging intellectual positions, which I don't think belong to the same set of characteristics like the ones mentioned in the text (race, disability, gender, etc.) and therefore would be acceptable.

Maybe adding a recursion clause? "This software can be used to disparage or discriminate on characteristics which inherently disparage or discriminate characteristics such as gender, disability, [...], etc." ;)

Don't forget religion: that's an intellectual position that is (in most countries) freely chosen.

Are you aware of the discussions about this topic from ~15 years ago? A lot of people disagree about the definition of hate speech, making interpretation of such licenses pretty subjective. It also opens the door to additional causes like "no nuclear weapons development" and such.

Nope, I'm not aware of past discussions on this. Do you have any pointers/links? I'd love to read about it :)

The definition I used is taken straight from Wikipedia's page on hate speech, and I feel like it's pretty straightforward.

As to how it opens the door to causes like "no nuclear weapons", I feel like it's a different issue altogether. Sure, it could be lumped in there, but I think hate speech and use for military purposes are 2 somewhat distinct things.

I'm trying to parse that abomination of a website. I'm not sure if it's an "anti-Obama", anti-Chinese, anti-Democrat, or what it is.

But yeah, the racism posited is reminiscent of the "Japs" shown in movie shorts of the 1940's. I guess it's a form of NIMBY; They aren't from my backyard.

I'll just suggest that you need to be far more explicit about what you mean by "hate speech". Take, for example, this comment of mine:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3416977

According to me, it's just a data-driven counterpoint to a claim made about the Finnish education system. However, according to at least two people in that thread, it was an expression of white supremecism.

Would I be forbidden from using NHPL software if I were creating a site visualizing the TIMSS/PISA data I cited?

How can I determine this without actually getting sued and going to court? (Compare to the GPL or most commercial licenses - where it's pretty clear whether I'm violating it or not.)

Nice. This is pretty standard practice for larger companies (TOS's), and I look forward to seeing how this idea grows.

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