Free, Libre, Open - Ethical?
Lars Marowsky-Brée November 15, 2024 #Open Source #PolicyTL;DR
Free, Libre, and Open Source freedoms, when treated as dogma, do harm. To truly serve our values, the "open" software community must not only do more but differently.
Introduction
In 2012, I spent May Day (of all days) as a speaker and attendee at the Linux Foundation's Enterprise End User Summit in New York, hosted at the New York Stock Exchange. On my way to the venue, we had to pass through police cordons and, theoretically, protesters. Remember, the Occupy Wall Street protests?
During the opening keynote, the CEO of NYSE thanked us as developers and a community for how Linux and Open Source had been instrumental in bringing down the cost of trades, and how this enabled trades to go from several minutes per trade to many thousands of trades per minute and High Frequency Trading.
I remember swallowing hard; feeling complicit. Many of us sympathized with the protesters's perspective - yet there we were, taking celebratory photos on the trading floor that evening, and optimizing the machine that kept it all ticking.
What happens when the tools we created to further our freedoms end up enabling outcomes that contradict our values?
Why Free and Open Source Software?
I came to this community because I believed (and still do) that, given the importance of software in our world, our society, our daily lives, we must have agency. It must not be a black box to us, and we must have the rights to inspect, understand, and modify it.
I also believed (and still do) that, for the vast majority of all use cases, building software collaboratively and openly (or at least having the option to) is the most effective method for society as a whole, but also sustainable technology and business.
We build an ever growing, ever improving public commons, fostering progress.
The loss of innocence
However, I am also no longer sixteen. I've built my career on Free, Libre, and Open Source Software; I've seen people implement bait-and-switch schemes on licensing, CLAs, exploitative practices that only consume and never give anything back or even undercut those who do (the trick to get really rich in capitalism is to exploit externalities until - if - regulation catches up with you), or pay the maintainers peanuts or nothing. (We have all seen the famous XKCD comic.)
More so, I've also seen quite a few political turns and shifts, not all of them progressive, but more and more reactionary backlashes. I've seen how big tech has contributed and profited from this. I know exactly who also wants big data systems.
Expecting perfect alignment on everything would, indeed, be unrealistic and detrimental; we need some resilience and elasticity in the face of differences. With those who are somewhat neutral and where we have complex nuanced differences of opinion and taste or reconcilable matters of policy, sure. The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
But I do not want my work to enable those with whom I have a truly fundamental systemic incompatibility; such as whose personhood is valid, whose love is valid, whose choices are valid.
Free and Open Source Software
I still believe that Free, Libre, and Open Source Software is much more compatible with my values than proprietary modes.
But these principles are not just the bare minimum: they actively constrain our ability to safeguard our values.
Unfettered, unrestricted
Because one aspect the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative agree on is that it must be free to use for any purpose; be it the for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose of the FSF's 0th Freedom, or the No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups & 6 No Discrimination Against Field of Endeavor of the Open Source Definition.
A project that, say, allowed its use for commercial purposes only if the company paid all its employees at least 10% above minimum wage? Not to be embedded in weapons of mass destruction?
Not Free Software. Not Open Source Software.
The OSI is very, very clear on this.
(It is somewhat ironic that the OSI would rather allow something to claim the Open Source branding despite its sources not being made public (for purported ethical/privacy considerations, no less!) than allow ethical considerations to affect the use and distribution of software when that might impede business. I have written about this recently, as have many others.)
We must ask: can a freedom go too far? As seen above, the FSF and OSI have the same answer as those who conflate freedom of speech with freedom from accountability.
And if only it were so simple; we could focus on the nerdy intricacies of our code and lose ourselves in a world we can control; rather than having to consider what the tools we build enable, and whether or not we may be accountable; if not legally, but to ourselves.
Of course, their position is limited externally already; obviously, it does not trump applicable law. We just don't get to add additional friction and constraints.
If, as a software developer or contributor, I can't formally forbid my work to be used for mass murder without being excluded from the currently largest software community, does that not strike you as strange?
We see here a variant of the paradox of tolerance.
Digression: Who are "we"
In this text, I've referenced "us" repeatedly, without ever defining it.
I think that is a question worth exploring, because "the" Free, Libre, and Open Source community is made up of many diverse individuals and groups with different backgrounds, motivations, goals, beliefs, ethics; Open vs Free is an example of overlapping but significantly diverging principles that yet mostly are able to join up for a greater goal.
This would be even more prominent if we exposed more of our beliefs and values; we would see more fractures in "our" groups. Who do we really want to be "we" with?
There is no single we, not one truly unified community. That is part of the pretence we need to go beyond, even if the shorthand is useful in communication. "We" are individuals with compatible enough shared goals and values forming groups to further those, and then compatible enough groups joining up to form larger alliances. There will always be some friction.
Tangent: license compatibility
One reason why this is opposed is that a proliferation of terms and conditions would make it difficult to determine whether multiple licenses are compatible and the works can be combined in certain ways.
Everyone working on Free, Libre, Open Source software, myself included, will concur with this. Most software engineering degrees fail to prepare us for arguing about what is or is not a derivative work, an aggregate, fair use, or the intricacies of how GPL, LGPL, AGPL, Apache, Mozilla, MIT, BSD differ, often in multiple versions. I suspect many of us had fun calls with lawyers that we could have done without.
This is, however, a flimsy reason to insist on doing nothing.
Modular systems, compatibility matrices, formalizing the most common terms are possible and, at this point, honestly would not make the situation all that much more complicated.
Endeavours for more ethical terms
There are already efforts to address this, such as the Hippocratic License for Open Source Communities, which strives to align technology with their values and offer a modular build for your own terms.
Alas, their adoption suffers from the challenge that a lot of the funding and effort flowing into the Free, Libre, and Open Source communities is controlled by those prioritizing profits over principles.
However, not all organizations are bound by shareholder primacy, profit maximization, or the military-surveillance complex.
Unions, cooperatives, public sector institutions, non-profits, hobbyist individuals or communities, and even ethically-minded businesses could lead the way in trialling and adopting such terms.
Freedom of Association
However, there is something else you - we - can do: we don't have to associate with those who endanger our values.
Most of our communities have codes of conduct and contributor guidelines already. Let's strengthen those. Take a stand.
We have the right to refuse interactions, contributions, patches, reports, sponsorships, or affiliations with individuals or organizations whose values, policies, or practices irreconcilably conflict with ours.
Our ethics and values can absolutely be loud, visible, and inconvenient.
Maybe the best choice of licensing for your project really is one that follows the Free, Open Source tenets. Maybe you can't control the choice. And yes, that means they could still use or fork the project. But that doesn't mean you have got to help further. Throw some sand into the machine.
Consider adopting ethical practices that go beyond Free, Libre, and Open Source. Demand them from those you associate with.
Be however patient in the face of imperfection. People will try and fall short; you, me, them. We exist in the world, and even when we change it, change is not instant.
It should come as no surprise that this, too, is already externally restricted via national and international law and regulations, see for example the Linux kernel. The governments will absolutely have their say; the idea that everyone is invited into every group is, frankly, naïve.
Free and Open Source won't save us
Free and Open Source as they are and by themselves do not lead to a fairer world.
We need to evolve beyond those rigid and supposedly "neutral" approaches; it is not just commercial exploitation which open-washes our communities (and where I believe that the Software Freedom Conservancy comes out ahead in their stance over OSI's pragmatism), but viewing software in isolation from the rest of society would be reductionist. To insist on "neutrality" is in itself a partisan position.
To quote the Organization for Ethical Source: The true measure of success for open source technologies is real-world impact: how what we co-create promotes positive social, cultural, and political change.
Everything public is politic. The only people who can "confidently" say that technology should be kept free of politics are those privileged enough to be safe either way; or at least believe themselves to be. And without empathy or awareness for the others. Do not yield to their demands of amorality.
Amorality in the face of injustice is immorality. Technology is not neutral.
Crafting perfect terms and licenses may well be impossible, but that is no excuse for complete inaction. Instead, we must experiment, refine, and adopt frameworks that align technology with our ethics.
Last week, I visited the German Museum of Technology. One exhibit is a Hollerith tabulating machine.