Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/08/30/on-social-justice-software-licensing.html

[ A similar version of this blog post
was cross-posted
on Software Freedom Conservancy’s blog. ]

In recent weeks, I’ve been involved with a complex internal discussion by
a major software freedom project about a desire to take a stance on social
justice issues other than software freedom. In the discussion, many
different people came forward with various issues that matter to them,
including vegetarianism, diversity, and speech censorship, wondering how that
software freedom project should handle other social justices causes that are
not software freedom. This week, (separate and fully unrelated)
another project, called Lerna,
publicly had a similar
debate. The issues involved are challenging, and it deserves careful
consideration regardless of how the issue is raised.

One of the first licensing discussions that I was ever involved in the mid
1990s was with a developer, who was a lifelong global peace activist, objecting
to the GPL because it allowed the USA Department of Defense and the wider
military industrial complex to incorporate software into their destructive
killing machines. As a lifelong pacifist myself, I sympathized with his
objection, and since then, I have regularly considered the question of
“do those who perpetrate other social injustices deserve software
freedom?”

I ultimately drew much of my conclusion about this from activists for free
speech, who have a longer history and have therefore had longer time to
consider the philosophical question. I remember in the late 1980s when I
first learned of the ACLU, and hearing that they assisted the Klu-Klux Klan
in their right to march. I was flabbergasted; the Klan is historically
well-documented as an organization that was party to horrific murder. Why
would the ACLU defend their free speech rights? Recently, many people had
a similar reaction when, in defense of the freedom of association and free
speech of the National Rifle Association
(NRA), the
ACLU filed an amicus brief in a case involving the NRA, an organization
that I and many others oppose politically. Again, we’re left wondering:
why should we act to defend the free speech and association rights of
political causes we oppose — particularly for those like the NRA and
big software companies who have adequate resources to defend
themselves?

A few weeks ago, I heard a good explanation of this in an
interview with
ACLU’s Executive Director, whom I’ll directly quote, as
he stated
succinctly the reason why ACLU has a long history of defending everyone’s
free speech and free association rights:

[Our decision] to
give legal representation to Nazis [was controversial].… It is not for the
government’s role to decide who gets a permit to march based on the content
of their speech. We got lots of criticism, both
internally and externally. … We believe these rights are for
everyone, and we truly mean it — even for people we hate and whose
ideology is loathsome, disgusting, and hurtful. [The ACLU can’t be] just a
liberal/left advocacy group; no liberal/left advocacy group would take on
these kinds of cases. … It is important for us to forge a path that talks
about this being about the rights of everyone.

Ultimately, fighting for software freedom is a social justice cause
similar to that of fighting for free speech and other causes that require
equal rights for all. We will always find groups exploiting those freedoms
for ill rather than good. We, as software freedom activists, will have to
sometimes grit our teeth and defend the rights to modify and improve software for those we otherwise oppose.
Indeed, they may even utilize that software
for those objectionable activities. It’s particularly annoying to do that for
companies that otherwise produce proprietary software: after all, in another realm, they are
actively working against our cause. Nevertheless, either we believe the Four Software Freedoms are universal, or we don’t. If we do,
even our active political opponents deserve them, too.

I think we can take a good example from the ACLU on this matter. The
ACLU, by standing firm on its core principles, now has, after two
generations of work, developed the power to make impact on related causes. The
ACLU is the primary organization defending immigrants who have been
forcibly separated from their children by the USA government. I’d posit that only an
organization with a long history of principled activity can have both the
gravitas and adequate resources to take on that issue.

Fortunately, software freedom is already successful enough that we can do
at least a little bit of that now. For example,
Conservancy (where I work) already
took a public position, early, in opposition of Trump’s immigration
policy because of its negative impact on software freedom, whose
advancement depends on the free flow of movement by technologists around
the world. Speaking out from our microphone built from our principled
stand on software freedom, we can make an impact that denying software
freedom to others never could. Specifically, rather than proprietarizing
the license of projects to fight USA’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) and its software providers, I’d encourage us to figure out a specific
FOSS package that we can prove is deployed for use at ICE, and use that
fact as a rhetorical lever to criticize their bad behavior. For example,
has anyone investigated if ICE uses Linux-based servers to host their
otherwise proprietary software systems? If so, the Linux community is
already large and powerful enough that if a group of Linux contributors
made a public statement in political opposition to the use of Linux in
ICE’s activities, it would get national news attention here in the USA. We
could even ally with the ACLU to assure the message is heard. No license
change is needed to do that, and it will surely be more effective.

Again, this is how software freedom is so much like free speech. We give
software freedom to all, which allows them to freely use and deploy the
software for any purpose, just like hate groups can use the free speech
microphone to share their ideas. However, like the ACLU, software
freedom activists, who simultaneously defend all users equal rights in
copying, sharing and modifying the software, can use their platform —
already standing on the moral high ground that was generated by
that long time principled support of equal rights — to speak out against
those who bring harm to society in other ways.

Finally, note that the
Four Software Freedoms obviously should never be the only laws and/or rules of conduct of our society. Just
like you should be prevented from (proverbially) falsely yelling Fire! in a crowded movie theater,
you still should be stopped when you deploy Free Software in a manner that violates some other
law, or commits human rights violations. However, taking away software freedom from bad actors, while it seems like a
panacea to other societal ills, will simply backfire. The
simplicity and beauty of copyleft is that it takes away someone’s software
freedom only at the moment when they take away someone else’s
software freedom; copyleft ensures that is the only reason your
software freedom should be lost. Simple tools work best when your social
justice cause is an underdog, and we risk obscurity of our software if we
seek to change the fundamental simple design of copyleft licensing to include licensing
penalties for other social justice grievances (— even if we could agree on which other
non-FOSS causes warrant “copyleft protection”). It
means we have a big tent for software freedom, and we sometimes stand under it with
people whose behavior we despise. The value we have is our ability to
stand with them under the tent, and tell them: “while I respect your
right to share and improve that software, I find the task you’re doing with
the software deplorable.”. That’s the message I deliver to any ICE
agent who used Free Software while forcibly separating parents from their children.