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  1. title: Challenges in Maintaining A Big Tent for Software Freedom
  2. url: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/08/30/on-social-justice-software-licensing.html
  3. hash_url: 6ace7858dade5090397174cd32a5586f
  4. <p>In recent weeks, I've been involved with a complex internal discussion by
  5. a major software freedom project about a desire to take a stance on social
  6. justice issues other than software freedom. In the discussion, many
  7. different people came forward with various issues that matter to them,
  8. including vegetarianism, diversity, and speech censorship, wondering how that
  9. software freedom project should handle other social justices causes that are
  10. not software freedom. This week, (separate and fully unrelated)
  11. another <a href="https://lernajs.io/">project, called Lerna</a>,
  12. <a href="https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1616">publicly had a similar
  13. debate</a>. The issues involved are challenging, and it deserves careful
  14. consideration regardless of how the issue is raised.</p>
  15. <p>One of the first licensing discussions that I was ever involved in the mid
  16. 1990s was with a developer, who was a lifelong global peace activist, objecting
  17. to the GPL because it allowed the USA Department of Defense and the wider
  18. military industrial complex to incorporate software into their destructive
  19. killing machines. As a lifelong pacifist myself, I sympathized with his
  20. objection, and since then, I have regularly considered the question of
  21. “do those who perpetrate other social injustices deserve software
  22. freedom?”</p>
  23. <p>I ultimately drew much of my conclusion about this from activists for free
  24. speech, who have a longer history and have therefore had longer time to
  25. consider the philosophical question. I remember in the late 1980s when I
  26. first learned of the ACLU, and hearing that they assisted the Klu-Klux Klan
  27. in their right to march. I was flabbergasted; the Klan is historically
  28. well-documented as an organization that was party to horrific murder. Why
  29. would the ACLU defend their free speech rights? Recently, many people had
  30. a similar reaction when, in defense of the freedom of association and free
  31. speech of the National Rifle Association
  32. (NRA), <a href="https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/new-york-state-cant-be-allowed-stifle-nras-political-speech">the
  33. ACLU filed an amicus brief in a case involving the NRA</a>, an organization
  34. that I and many others oppose politically. Again, we're left wondering:
  35. why should we act to defend the free speech and association rights of
  36. political causes we oppose — particularly for those like the NRA and
  37. big software companies who have adequate resources to defend
  38. themselves? </p>
  39. <p>A few weeks ago, I heard a good explanation of this in an
  40. interview <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/podcasts/the-daily/aclu-nra-trump.html">with
  41. ACLU's Executive Director</a>, whom I'll directly quote, as
  42. he <a href="https://content.production.cdn.art19.com/episodes/50830434-0549-4cca-94c5-d2fbdfe5c795/baea71612188cfc13cb109598142253f21b5395f38cf0201dc81b214db8c72a4693e5501e5b998a94d8ad6ae01974fd4fc7f7a41a63b34c74a8ae7a2e0c21884/20180730%20TD%20MASTER%20SUBMIX%20CW%20FINAL.mp3#t=904">stated
  43. succinctly the reason why ACLU has a long history of defending everyone's
  44. free speech and free association rights</a>: </p><blockquote>[Our decision] to
  45. give legal representation to Nazis [was controversial].… It is not for the
  46. government's role to decide who gets a permit to march based on the content
  47. of their speech. We got <strong>lots</strong> of criticism, both
  48. internally and externally. … We believe these rights are for
  49. everyone, and we truly mean it — even for people we hate and whose
  50. ideology is loathsome, disgusting, and hurtful. [The ACLU can't be] just a
  51. liberal/left advocacy group; no liberal/left advocacy group would take on
  52. these kinds of cases. … It is important for us to forge a path that talks
  53. about this being about the rights of everyone.</blockquote>
  54. <p>Ultimately, fighting for software freedom is a social justice cause
  55. similar to that of fighting for free speech and other causes that require
  56. equal rights for all. We will always find groups exploiting those freedoms
  57. for ill rather than good. We, as software freedom activists, will have to
  58. sometimes grit our teeth and defend the rights to modify and improve software for those we otherwise oppose.
  59. Indeed, they may even utilize that software
  60. for those objectionable activities. It's particularly annoying to do that for
  61. companies that otherwise produce proprietary software: after all, in another realm, <em>they</em> are
  62. actively working against our cause. Nevertheless, either we believe the Four Software Freedoms are universal, or we don't. If we do,
  63. even our active political opponents deserve them, too.</p>
  64. <p>I think we can take a good example from the ACLU on this matter. The
  65. ACLU, by standing firm on its core principles, now has, after two
  66. generations of work, developed the power to make impact on related causes. The
  67. ACLU is the primary organization defending immigrants who have been
  68. forcibly separated from their children by the USA government. I'd posit that only an
  69. organization with a long history of principled activity can have both the
  70. gravitas and adequate resources to take on that issue.</p>
  71. <p>Fortunately, software freedom is already successful enough that we can do
  72. at least a little bit of that now. For example,
  73. Conservancy (where I work) <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2017/jan/30/opposing-us-immigration-ban/">already
  74. took a public position, early, in opposition of Trump's immigration
  75. policy</a> because of its negative impact on software freedom, whose
  76. advancement depends on the free flow of movement by technologists around
  77. the world. Speaking out from our microphone built from our principled
  78. stand on software freedom, we can make an impact that denying software
  79. freedom to others never could. Specifically, rather than proprietarizing
  80. the license of projects to fight USA's Immigration and Customs Enforcement
  81. (ICE) and its software providers, I'd encourage us to figure out a specific
  82. FOSS package that we can prove is deployed for use at ICE, and use that
  83. fact as a rhetorical lever to criticize their bad behavior. For example,
  84. has anyone investigated if ICE uses Linux-based servers to host their
  85. otherwise proprietary software systems? If so, the Linux community is
  86. already large and powerful enough that if a group of Linux contributors
  87. made a public statement in political opposition to the use of Linux in
  88. ICE's activities, it would get national news attention here in the USA. We
  89. could even ally with the ACLU to assure the message is heard. No license
  90. change is needed to do that, and it will surely be more effective.</p>
  91. <p>Again, this is how software freedom is so much like free speech. We give
  92. software freedom to all, which allows them to freely use and deploy the
  93. software for any purpose, just like hate groups can use the free speech
  94. microphone to share their ideas. However, like the ACLU, software
  95. freedom activists, who simultaneously defend all users equal rights in
  96. copying, sharing and modifying the software, can use their platform —
  97. already standing on the moral high ground that was <em>generated</em> by
  98. that long time principled support of equal rights — to speak out against
  99. those who bring harm to society in other ways.</p>
  100. <p>Finally, note that the
  101. Four Software Freedoms obviously should never be the only laws and/or rules of conduct of our society. Just
  102. like you should be prevented from (proverbially) falsely yelling <q>Fire!</q> in a crowded movie theater,
  103. you still should be stopped when you deploy Free Software in a manner that violates some other
  104. law, or commits human rights violations. However, taking away software freedom from bad actors, while it <em>seems</em> like a
  105. panacea to other societal ills, will simply backfire. The
  106. simplicity and beauty of copyleft is that it takes away someone's software
  107. freedom <em>only</em> at the moment when they take away someone else's
  108. software freedom; copyleft ensures that is the <em>only</em> reason your
  109. software freedom should be lost. Simple tools work best when your social
  110. justice cause is an underdog, and we risk obscurity of our software if we
  111. seek to change the fundamental simple design of copyleft licensing to include licensing
  112. penalties for other social justice grievances (— even if we could agree on which other
  113. non-FOSS causes warrant “copyleft protection”). It
  114. means we have a big tent for software freedom, and we sometimes stand under it with
  115. people whose behavior we despise. The value we have is our ability to
  116. stand with them under the tent, and tell them: “while I respect your
  117. right to share and improve that software, I find the task you're doing with
  118. the software deplorable.”. That's the message I deliver to any ICE
  119. agent who used Free Software while forcibly separating parents from their children.</p>