Bringing ethics back to open source
A presentation at FOSDEM in in Brussels, Belgium by Tobie Langel
Bringing back ethics to open source
Tobie Langel (@tobie) tobie@unlockopen.com
First, a disclaimer.
…well, two actually.
- [IANAL]: I am not a lawyer.
- [WIP]: This is a work in progress.
I don’t have all the answers.
Goal: start a conversation.
So, what are we going to talk about?
- A bit of context
- A different perspective on the OSD
- Let’s look at prior art
- What’s missing from it?
- Role of corporations
- What do we get out of this
- Critiques
- Next steps
- Q&A
Context
So... what is this about?
- Increasing concerns about the negative impact of tech.
- Historical context of tech used at scale in Human Rights violations.
- A desire to do something about it through open source licensing.
- Previous attempts at doing so. Pushback from gatekeepers (that’s their role, so understandable).
OSI, OSD, 4 freedoms, etc.
- Open Source Initiative (OSI): a non-profit that is responsible for deciding which license is an open source license.
- Open Source Definition (OSD): a set of 10 criteria necessary for a license to be considered an open source license.
- 4 freedoms: The four criteria necessary for software to be considered free software (copyleft).
Desacralizing the OSD*
*OSD = Open Source Definition
Desacralizing the OSD
- Created in a hurry over 20 yrs ago.
- Lifted from the Debian Free Software Guidelines. *Never updated since.
4 freedoms list of change
American constitution
EcmaScript language
EcmaScript language
Desacralizing the OSD
- Expression of the privilege of its authors.
- Ethical concerns would have been central had the OSD been written in less privileged circles.
- What if open source had succeeded in spite of the OSD and not because of it? ➢ Consider license adoption & who chooses software (hint: devs, not lawyers).
(Some) Prior Art
(Some) Prior Art
- Douglas Crockford’s “Good, not Evil” license.
- The Hippocratic License by Coraline Ada Ehmke.
“Good, not Evil” License
- MIT license & “Good, not Evil” clause:
“The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.”
Problem: leaves the definition of Good and Evil to interpretation.
Crockford ended-up putting JSON in the public domain instead.
The Hippocratic License
- Solves the problem of defining Evil by relying on the Human Rights.
- Doesn’t conflict with criteria 5 & 6 of the OSD by narrowing down limitation to actions (and not people, groups, or fields of endeavor).
- Problems:
- Leaves the definition of human rights violation to the courts.
- No strong adoption story. @tobie
What’s missing?
What’s missing
- Reliance on internationally recognized and respected body that defines actual violation of Human Rights.
- Community buy-in and multi-stakeholder support:
- Maintainers
- Actual open source projects
- Nonprofits such as OSI, Apache Foundation, Linux Foundation, etc.
- Corporations (OSPO, C-suite, Legal)
- Clear path from existing licenses to ethical ones ➢ Legal aspects, tooling, education, etc.
- A mindset shift to redefine the norm as respectful of Human Rights.
From Fringe to Norm
Corporations!?
Corporations!?
- Yes. If corps can’t use it, it’ll never have traction.
- Corporations often in Prisoner’s Dilemma situation:
- Would gladly stop infuriating their employees by dropping these small problematic contracts.
- Problematic contracts often tied to orders of magnitude larger contracts they can’t afford to lose.
- Provide an excuse to reject problematic contracts without risking the other ones.
What do we get out of this?
A moral compass for our industry
More concretely
- Puts Human Rights at the heart of open source & software development.
- Human Rights-trained IP lawyers in corporations.
- Gives corporations an excuse to reject certain contracts.
- Potentially reduces the pool of available software for Human Rights violations.
Critiques
Critiques
- Other/better way to address this.
- Risk of ethical license proliferation.
- Compliance nightmare.
- Not enforceable, so not worth it.
- In violation of OSD and/or 4 freedoms.
Next steps
Next steps
- This is a huge multi-year effort
- Must be community-backed
- Assess interest
- Outreach
- Figure out where to lead it from
- OSI?
- New structure? Support? Volunteers? Funding?
Thank you.
Q&A
Most discussions around ethical licenses today consider the Open Source Definition (OSD) with the same reverence as Moses did the tablets delivered to him on Mount Sinai.
The OSD is in fact much more mundane than that. And it tells us more about its authors than about the open source movement in general; had open source been born in less privileged circles, ethical considerations would have been baked in from the start.
With that in mind, let’s revisit what we’re actually trying to collectively achieve through the open source movement and reconsider the notion that its mission requires we allow the software we build be used in violation of Human Rights.
There are minimally-disruptive changes that can be made to the OSD and to existing licenses which would put ethical concerns centerstage, where they belong, and help us foster responsibility and accountability within our community and within software vendors.
We’ll look at the past attempts at creating ethical licenses and why they have failed. We’ll ask all of the hard questions, even those we don’t have good answers to yet. And we’ll propose a new, multi-pronged approach to this issue. One that we believe, while more demanding to implement, has a much better chance of success than previous attempts have had.
Resources
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
