Hi all,

Before write what I am about to write, I would like to be clear that this is a very controversial topic and, for the eyes of many of you, this will be even silly.

I also know that open source means “open for everyone”, and any conditional to that automatically makes a piece of software non-open source.

I really feel pissed off to see such effort for brilliant people from open source community being used for terrible things. So I started to nurture the idea of a license that would forbid the usage of a project by totalitarian governments, including its department and contractors, military forces of any country, certain entities like radical political parties, etc. Basically limiting the usage of those projects to any activity promoting human suffering.

Do you guys think that this is utopic? Does it really hurt the essence of open source? Do you think in the same way about this, and if yes, how do you cope with that?

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    176·
    21 hours ago

    Much better to add features to your software that make it unusable in totalitarian situations.

    For example

    • if you’re building a reddit clone, make each subreddit elect their moderators every few months.
    • Maybe ask How fat is Kim Jon Un during installation.
    • Display the text “Taiwan is not a part of China” in the status bar, randomly

    …and so on. The possibilities are endless.