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Comment by bioneuralnet | Hacker News Reader

Weird that the internal systems communicate via an Ingress, but I guess that's government contractors for you. Clearly they should have gone with Istio instead.

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While we're being absurd, are there any open source/copyleft licences that specifically forbid uses in war or weapons? I guess the gov will do whatever they want, but it would be interesting to see how it played out.

I think that's pretty common, as far as bespoke licenses go.

I remember reading the license of a game engine that forbade using it for military training. I thought it was Quake but it doesn't seem to be.

There are, but neither the FSF nor OSI support them. Those provisions go against OSI's rule 6 and FSF's rule 0. Both believe free software and open source software licenses should allow the software to be used openly by anyone. On the other hand, breaking software licenses is fair game in war.

The HGPL-4 states that all systems using covered source code must be programmed to attack those who would threaten our software freedoms. It's in the "paradox of tolerance" clause. See also: Creative Commons BY-NC-ID (ideological derivative) which allows noncommercial remixes with attribution, but not in works that promote copyright.

What is the HGPL-4? Google yields no results, other than this thread :P

Unenforceable provisions are a mockery of man.

Considering that GPL's provisions are already being ignored under "national security", I doubt one more clause would matter.

> Considering that GPL's provisions are already being ignored under "national security", I doubt one more clause would matter.

By who?

US companies. One example is Motorola Solutions Inc. All of their new handheld radios run linux on the inside and have been confirmed to run code under GPL. Nothing has been released in the past decades.

There is the story of the JSON licence excluding evil use and a company approached the author to get an unambiguous licence

"Using JSLint for Evil" is one of my favorite talks :)

https://youtu.be/-hCimLnIsDA

If I remember correctly, he was happy to do so, because the hilarity of issuing a license "for evil" to a company.

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