Hey Habr! I present to your attention the translation of the article by Klint Finley.
China to calculate Uyghur Muslims. The US military uses , as well as nearby civilians. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement - the same ones that kept children in cages near the Mexican border - rely on software for communication and coordination, like all modern organizations.
Someone has to write the code that makes all this possible. Increasingly, developers are calling on their employers and the government to stop using their work for unethical purposes. Google employees convinced the company to stop and cancel all plans to bid for cloud computing for the Pentagon. Microsoft employees protested and the military, albeit with minimal success.
However, it is quite difficult to prevent companies or governments from using software that has already been written, especially when that software is in the public domain. Last month, for example, Seth Vargo open source code (open source) from online repositories in protest against its potential use by the Immigration Police. However, since open source code can be freely copied and distributed, all of the removed code was very soon available elsewhere.
Coraline Ida Emki wants to give her fellow programmers more control over how their software is used. Software released under her new may be distributed and modified for any purpose, with one major exception: the software may not be used by individuals, corporations, governments, or other groups in systems or activities that actively and willfully endanger, harm, or otherwise endanger physical or mental health, as well as the economic or other well-being of individuals or groups of people, in violation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Defining exactly what “harm” means is inherently difficult and contentious, but Emki hopes that linking this license to already existing international standards will help reduce the uncertainty on this issue. “The Declaration of Human Rights is a 70-year-old document widely accepted for its definitions of harm and what exactly constitutes a violation of human rights,” Emki said.
Of course, this is a rather bold proposal, but Emki . In 2014, she wrote the first draft of the rules of conduct for open source projects called "Code of Conduct for Contributors". It was met with skepticism at first, but more than 40000 open source projects have already adopted these rules, from Google's TensorFlow AI platform to the Linux kernel.
True, at the moment, few people publish material under the "Hippocratic License", even Emki herself does not use it yet. The license still has to go through legal approvals, for which Emki hired a lawyer, plus various obstacles are possible, including in the form of compatibility with other licenses that will have to be dealt with somehow.
Emki agrees that changing how engineers license their work won't in itself stop human rights violations. However, she wants to give people a tool to deter various companies, governments, or other malevolent entities from using their code to commit crimes.
The non-profit organization Open Source Initiative stated that open source software "should not discriminate against individuals or groups of people" and "should not restrict anyone in trying to use software in certain areas of work."
Whether human rights violations are “certain areas of work” remains to be seen (Approx. Per. there's a lot of sarcasm here) as Emki hasn't officially submitted her "Hippocratic License" to OSI for review yet. However the organization has indicated that this license does not fit the definition of free software. OSI co-founder Bruce Pierence also that this license is contrary to the definition given by their organization.
Emki hopes to unite the open source developer community to pressure OSI to either change their definition or create a new one. "I think the OSI definition is terribly outdated," Emki said. “At the moment, the open source community simply does not have the tools in their hands to prevent the use of our technologies, for example, by fascists.”
Emka's concerns are shared by other developers. Michael Caferella, co-founder of the popular open source data processing platform Hadoop, has seen his tools used for purposes he couldn't imagine, including by the National Security Agency. “It's good if people start to think about who and how uses their software. Personally, I worry the most about abuse by non-democratic states that have significant engineering resources to change and roll out new projects. I do not have the necessary experience to say whether this (the Hippocratic License) will be enough to stop such abuses,” he said.
Attempts to change the definitions of open source to take ethical issues into account have a long and controversial history. Emki is far from the first to attempt to write a license that would prevent the use of open source to cause harm. So peer to peer was released in 2006 under a license prohibiting its use by the military. So far, such measures have had little effect, but this may change. Earlier this year the Anti-996 license, which requires users to comply with both local and international labor standards, in response to news of abominable working conditions at Chinese technology companies. Emki hopes that the public reaction to the actions of the US Immigration Police, which has spread far beyond the technology sector, may be the very tipping point.
Some point to the possibility of adopting a new term for a code that is open to use by some but closed to others. "Maybe we should stop calling our software 'open' and start calling it 'open for good'." , the same programmer who previously removed his code in protest against the Immigration Police.
The term "open source software" was adopted in the late 1990s as an alternative to "free software", and was associated with certain ideological moments at the time. And now, as developers become more ideological, perhaps it's time for another term to emerge.
Source: habr.com