But there is nothing stopping us from taking this further. In the past these licenses were used to allow the free distribution, modification, and use of our software. Open source licenses have long been the primary tool for promoting the use of our software under our own rules and conditions. But if those novel situations involve harming other people, we can and should feel responsible. One of the delightful things about code is discovering its utility in novel situations. You can’t build systems that can be weaponized against marginalized people and take no responsibility for them. There is no neutral political position in technology.
The facial recognition software that unlocks your phone? It’s being used to record, track, and target the activities of political dissenters.Īll of these technologies are inherently political.
Consider the GPS software that tells you how to get to a restaurant it’s also used to direct military drones to their targets. Politics and software are so tangled that they cannot be reasonably separated. We have told ourselves that development is a pure and abstract pursuit, and have spent our careers writing programs with the goals of clarity, conciseness, readability, performance, and elegance.īut we are starting to realize that the software that we create has a real and lasting impact on the world in which we live.
An Ethical License for Open Source Projectsįor too long, we as software developers have divorced ourselves from the consequences of the code that we write.
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