{"id":8106,"date":"2018-08-29T14:19:53","date_gmt":"2018-08-29T18:19:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8106"},"modified":"2019-06-01T13:36:23","modified_gmt":"2019-06-01T17:36:23","slug":"non-discrimination-is-a-core-value-of-open-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8106","title":{"rendered":"Non-discrimination is a core value of open source"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I learned that something called the Lerna project has <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/lerna\/lerna\/pull\/1616\">added a codicil<\/a> to its MIT license denying the use of its software to a long list of organizations because it disagrees with a political choice those organizations have made.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking as one of the original co-authors of the <a href=\"https:\/\/opensource.org\/osd-annotated\"<\/a>Open Source Definition<\/a>, I state a fact. As amended, the Lerna license is no longer conformant with the OSD. It has specifically broken compliance with clause 5 (&#8220;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>Accordingly, Lerna has defected from the open-source community and should be shunned by anyone who values the health of that community.  I will not contribute to their project, and will urge others not to, until and unless this change is rescinded.<\/p>\n<p>We wrote Clause 5 into the OSD for a good reason.  Exclusions and carve-outs like Lerna&#8217;s, if they became common, would create tremendous uncertainty about the ethics and even the legality of code re-use.   Suppose I were to take a snippet from Lerna code and re-use it in a project that (possibly without my knowledge) was deployed by one of the proscribed organizations; what would my ethical and legal exposure be?<\/p>\n<p>It gets worse.  Suppose I write code that happened to be identical, or very similar to, portions of Lerna? Could anyone make a case that I was in violation of their license?  It is definitely unsafe when a question like that turns on facts of knowledge and intent no one outside a putative violator&#8217;s skull can know for certain.<\/p>\n<p>The Lerna project&#8217;s choice is, moreover, destructive of one of the deep norms that keeps the open-source community functional &#8211; keeping politics separated from our work.  If we do not maintain that norm, we risk fractionating into a collection of squabbling tribes arguing particularisms and unable to sustain really large-scale cooperation.<\/p>\n<p>I would consider such a disintegration not merely unpleasant but actually dangerous to civilization, which relies on us for an increasing portion of its critical infrastructure. Accordingly, we need to cooperate more, not less.<\/p>\n<p>That, in turn, means that, even as we may hold strong individual opinions about issues like those motivating Lerna&#8217;s proscription list, we need to be <em>more<\/em> neutral and non-discriminatory in our collective behavior about such issues, not less.<\/p>\n<p>Update: Less than 24 hours after I posted this, the license change was revoked and its committer expelled from the project.  This is how sanity wins &#8211; one fightback at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I learned that something called the Lerna project has added a codicil to its MIT license denying the use of its software to a long list of organizations because it disagrees with a political choice those organizations have made. Speaking as one of the original co-authors of the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8106"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8340,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8106\/revisions\/8340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}