Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

Over on the Software FreedomConservancy blog, Bradley M. Kuhn considersthe question of the interaction between copyleft and the "ethical source" effort that seeks touse copyleft-like licensing to bring about additional changes, beyond justsoftware freedom; the HippocraticLicense is an example of such a license. In his view, copyleft andethical software are not really compatible, even though many infree-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 moralimperative to change FOSS licenses themselves to contractually forbid Putinto copy, modify, redistribute and reinstall the FOSS he already has (orsurreptitiously downloaded by circumventing sanctions). However, thesehorrendous events in Ukraine offer real world examples to consider theviability of expanding copyleft term expansion beyond software, andconsider how it might work. My analysis is that such changes would onlygive us the false sense of having "done something". Ultimately enforcementof such licensing changes would either be impossible or pointless. The veryentities (such as the varied international courts and treaty organizations)that could enforce such terms will also have plenty of other war crimes andsanctions violations to bring against Putin and his cronies anyway. Thepenalties for the actions of war that Putin took will be much stronger thanPutin's contractual breach or copyright infringement claim that could bebrought under a modified copyleft license and/or the Hippocratic License.