Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/888453/

Over on the Software Freedom
Conservancy blog, Bradley M. Kuhn considers
the question of the interaction between copyleft and the “ethical source” effort that seeks to
use copyleft-like licensing to bring about additional changes, beyond just
software freedom; the Hippocratic
License is an example of such a license. In his view, copyleft and
ethical software are not really compatible, even though many in
free-software world (including Kuhn) are highly sympathetic to the goals,
especially in light of the recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

I suspect activists will continue to disagree about whether we have a moral
imperative to change FOSS licenses themselves to contractually forbid Putin
to copy, modify, redistribute and reinstall the FOSS he already has (or
surreptitiously downloaded by circumventing sanctions). However, these
horrendous events in Ukraine offer real world examples to consider the
viability of expanding copyleft term expansion beyond software, and
consider how it might work. My analysis is that such changes would only
give us the false sense of having “done something”. Ultimately enforcement
of such licensing changes would either be impossible or pointless. The very
entities (such as the varied international courts and treaty organizations)
that could enforce such terms will also have plenty of other war crimes and
sanctions violations to bring against Putin and his cronies anyway. The
penalties for the actions of war that Putin took will be much stronger than
Putin’s contractual breach or copyright infringement claim that could be
brought under a modified copyleft license and/or the Hippocratic License.