Stopping evil and open source: my thoughts

This blog post is a reaction to a blog post on Stopping bad guys. (I’ve
shortened the title. Please follow link to read original.)

I write open source software for the sake of humanity. I want to live off my
work, certainly, but more importantly, I want the software I build to make
life better for other people in the future.

I don’t think open source developers should use licenses to combat bad guys
doing evil things. I think doing so will harm the ecosystem, but not prevent
actual evil from happening.

It is becoming increasingly common for open source developers to be concerned
what other people do with their software. The blog post I linked to above is
an example. Many developers object to their software being used by fossil fuel
companies, oppressive law enforcement, or others. Some of the developers are
trying to change their open source licenses to prevent those groups from using
the software.

I concur with the goal: the modern day Gestapo in the US should be stopped,
and so should companies who destroy the global ecosystem. Genocide should be
stopped and prevented. All of these need to happen, but using licenses as a
weapon for this is a bad idea. It doesn’t actually work, but it poisons the
open source ecosystem.

A fundamental reason why open source thrives at all is because it enables
easy, low-friction use of existing software to build new software. I write
a library, you combine parts of that and parts of other libraries to make an
application, but you do not have to negotiate terms. When we did this tens of
millions times we got the world of today where every information system is at
least partly made out of open source software.

Open source licenses are not all fully compatible with each other, but there’s
enough popular, compatible licenses that by and large it’s nearly always
possible to combine code from different sources to build something new.

I’m old and cynical: those who kidnap or murder people, or who are just
immensely wealthy, don’t really care if they violate open source licenses,
because there not really anyone with the will and resources to stop them.
Changing the license of your open source project won’t stop, say, the IDF,
ICE, Shell, or Meta, who all find they can stand above the law.

The good guys who would build something benign on what you’ve done will,
however, have to tread much more carefully and do much more work to do
so. They’re good people, and they do their best to follow the rules. A
well-meaning, but incompatible, license may jell cause too much friction for
the benign application from ever being created.

We, the non-evil parts of humanity, need other ways to resist evil people
and organizations. I’m afraid I don’t have an easy solution. You can speak up
when you see a problem. You can refuse to help evildoers. You can resist bad
things. You can take care of other people. You can do and build good things.
These are all going to work in the long run, I’m sure, but they require a lot
of courage, a lot of persistence, and a lot of time. In Finnish terms, they
require a lot of sisu.

Another aspect that open source developers worry about is if a large
corporation makes use of their software to make a profit, but doesn’t
contribute back in any way. I can understand this worry, but I am myself in
the lucky position where I don’t need to care. I’m OK with others profiting
from what I’ve built, as long as they don’t cause trouble for me, or cause me
to have to do more without compensation. If I was trying to, say, run a paid
service and Amazon competed with me, I might think differently. But I care
more about building things to help humanity.

I mostly don’t care about for-profit companies: they can be a useful social
construct, but people actually matter. As long as companies, meaning the
people who run them, don’t harm people, or the environment, and don’t get in
the way of making things better for people, I’m happy to not care.

If they want me to do something, either they pay me or I say no.

This is my opinion, and I’m fine with others disagreeing with me. I may well
change my mind when I think about this further. I publish this on my blog
so that I get it out of my head, and make room for my thoughts about this
to grow.