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Discussion on: Ethical source movement, or how to try to fight the evil corporation to use your code

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geraldew profile image
geraldew

So far, the chief misunderstanding that comes from the Ethical Source camp is their imagination that copyright law can enforce compliance with things other than copyright.

For that is what all the various current Free Software and Open Source licenses are able to achiieve. It is the "trick" of using copyright law to enforce freedom of use by embedding the license statement into the copyrighted work. The reason this works so widely is mainly due to the nearly complete uniformity of copyright laws around the world.

To be frank, while the ideals of FSF and OSI have their own worthiness, they would be mere wishful thinking without the ability to bend copyright law to the purpose.

As simple examples, two other aspects of so-called "Intellectual Property" law that licenses alone cannot enforce are patents and trademarks. While some licenses attempt this, the laws involved are far more varied internationally and the legal concepts are different enough to not be so clearly bound by merely having statement text embedded in the work.

This isn't to decry the intentions of the Ethical Source proponents, but as long as they fantasise that Free and Open Source licenses are part of the problem then they are perhaps only performing a kind of displacement activity.

p.s. in looking at their web site, sadly I still see nothing of substance, only a list of their principles about themselves, and a list of licenses that they don't yet endorse. Not a criticism as such, all things must have beginnings, and that organisation dates from around December, 2020. Interestingly, there is a (quite?) separate and longstanding movement of "ethical sourcing" in the world outside of software - showing that, as always, naming these concepts uniquely is itself a tricky matter.