Me: Free software licenses should include ethics clauses.
Folks: Don’t be silly, you can’t put restrictions on licenses like that. It’s unworkable.
Apple: You can only run this operating system on hardware I sell.
Folks: Sounds good to us, sir. Whatever you say, boss!
If our only answer to unethical licenses is indifferent ones—as opposed to ethical ones—I don’t see how we win this. I feel the offhand dismissal of ethical licenses in technology has been and is a mistake.
(I don’t argue it’s a simple thing to get right. I don’t overlook the complexities involved. I don’t have all the solutions. But I feel we should be exploring the problem and coming up with workable solutions instead of dismissing it outright as infeasible. There is value even in exploring the problem. The journey is the destination and all that…)
@aral I guess I can only think of all the ways the precedent will be abused for ideological tit-for-tat ("software must not be used to aid abortions, gender reassignment therapy, vaccinations").
This is currently playing out in the US. A similar well-intentioned move a number of years back sought to ban books from school libraries that had racist content (ie. racial slurs in Huck Finn). The current wave of book banning is a direct ideological tit-for-tat response to that move.
