Whether I wrote about a 0th law of software freedomsAn ensuing discussion suggested that it could better be summarized as “four freedoms and a right”.
, or that AI is a fascist project, the fundamental issue is that “the next thing” must ensure to enshrine human rights in its philosophy.
That’s a grand statement to make. I turned it into one of the foundations for the Interpeer Project, and I have to admit, that has led me down more twisted passages than I signed up for. Decisions that one makes in source code and software design do not work the same when you consider the repercussions they might have on vulnerable people using your software.
I can point to the Human Rights Protocols Considerations research group for inspiration, and recommend the guidance of RFC 8280 and RFC 9260 as starting points to such work. But it doesn’t make “human rights” any easier to consider in your software.
Those are protocol and architecture considerations, so things individual developers can turn to when they write code. Did I design this in a way that puts people at risk? If so, can I do better? If I cannot, should I do this? And if I cannot do better, and should nonetheless do this, how can I help people understand that there be dragons here?
The reason I have recently adopted “MOSS gardening” as a term for what I would like to do is that both free software and open source have failed to address this well.
I hear a lot of counter-arguments to this last point. I will list a few, and address them briefly.
- This is literally why Free Software was born:
- People argue that Richard Stallman was led to form the Free Software movement because he wanted to help others. The episode has become part of the “FSF bible”.
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People point out that the altruistic motivation is proof that the entire point is, essentially, to establish a “right” to “own” the software people are using – a kind of human right?
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It does not invalidate this event to point out that the formulation of “freedoms” in FSF, or the open source definitions emphasize contributor freedoms, not the needs of the population, effectively conflating the twoIt may just be a product of its time, where computer users were a rare breed.
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- It’s essential that we do not restrict use:
- I am firmly against the libertarian suggestion that software should be available “for any use”, when such use includes human rights violations.
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The counter arguments I hear is that usage restrictions are difficult to manage (fair, but hardly a reason to fuel genocide), or that restrictions can themselves be used to e.g. prevent vulnerable groups from accessing the software.
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This kind of free speech absolutism has already been weaponized leading to the most absurd claims of e.g. allowing hate speech under “free speech” arguments.
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This is why insisting on human rights cannot be seen as a restriction. They’re deliberately formulated to avoid such misuse, and do a much better job at that than a license text could.
- We’re already operating in legal frameworks, this adds nothing:
- It is true that a human rights violation would lead to some form of conviction in many of the world’s places (except for countries which did not ratify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). But that is only part of the point.
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It isn’t about whether bad people get punished. It is at least as much a signal, both to would-be offenders and contributors. It is a basis for community standards.
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You can get all of this with other agreements, it’s true. But then there is even less of a reason left to exclude this from a new “MOSS definition”.
- Licenses that are not enforced are worthless:
- Legally speaking, there is a point to this argument. If I prohibit something in a license, and then fail to enforce its terms when I am made aware of a violation, then this can weaken my position in court. I can be seen as having accepted the violation.
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This presupposes that licenses are the tool we’d use, in the same way that copyleft does. They may be a part of the tool box. But we’re talking about more fundamental things here, not tools.
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We’re talking about who we want to be.