First Do No Harm
Chef Sugar is a module for the infrastructure automation tool Chef. In September, it came to the attention of the module’s developer that Chef had entered a contract with the United State’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Citing "a moral and ethical obligation to prevent [his] source from being used for evil", he removed the code from its public repository. While this is not the first time a developer removing a public module has garnered attention, it raises a number of questions for the free software and open source communities, namely, “What should ‘free as in freedom’ actually entail,” and “what can developers actually demand of their users?”
Free Software isn’t Free
One of the Free Software Foundation’s mantras, mentioned earlier, is “free as in freedom,” and as anyone who’s taken an introductory philosophy course in University (*raises hand*) can’t help but mention (aside from the fact that they took Philospohy in University) is that freedom comes in two flavors, positive and negative. As a result of this dichotomy, the notion of absolute freedom is a fallacious one. One individual’s positive freedom to exercise an action can infringe upon another individual’s negative freedom from the consequences of that action being exercised.
On a less abstract level, free software imposes requirements on its users by way of waiving copyright restrictions in accordance with the terms enumerated in its license. The severity of these requirements vary from trivial attribution requests to the viral terms of Copyleft licenses. It is clear that the “freedom” of free software is bounded to some degree.
Ethical Source Software
Ethics in computing is hardly a glamorous topic, a sentiment that only compounds the a priori feelings of apathy towards it. What’s the worst thing that anyone has done with a computer? Invent Facebook? Unlike other professions, such as medicine, computing is seen as benign, and rightly so because it is only ever employed directly in benign tasks. The problem with this perspective however, is that it ignores the nature of computing; that computing is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.
The most apt illustration of this idea comes from the earliest days of computing, before the advent of the semiconductor, when in 1933 the Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, a direct subsidiary of the newly-christened International Business Machines (IBM), began collating census data for the newly-appointed Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler. Their work quadrupled the the number of citizens associated with Jewish heritage at the time, accounting for almost one-third the murders committed in concentration camps by the end of the war.[1]
Today, orders of magnitude more data is being processed with computational power unimaginable almost a century ago, with the aim of identifying persons in the United States without the necessary heritage or legal documents. Though the intent may be dissimilar from that of the leader of the Weimar Republic, the results are not. This is the power of computing: it confers upon the user a multiplicative force that warrants even greater care.
David and Goliath
Now, dear reader, I’m sure you’re thinking, “That’s all fine and good, but I’m just one developer. You honestly expect me to be able to go toe-to-toe against *insert big corporation here*!?” Yes, I do, because others have, and made a mark. Case in point: The much-maligned JSON license, a near-carbon copy of the much-beloved MIT license, with one additional caveat:
The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.
These nine words ring of origins on Mount Sinai and have caused concern among fellow developers and lawyers alike, with users (in a twist directed by M. Night Shamalan) such as IBM, asking for special licensing. Listening to the JSON licenses’ creator, Douglas Crockford, speak about it gives one the sense that its inception wasn’t exactly driven by serious ethical concerns regarding the use of JSON, however it does demonstrate that licensing does matter and can be a powerful tool if wielded properly.
A Hippocratic Corpus for the Rest of Us*
One of the biggest criticisms of the JSON license, that I must agree with, is that the wording is ambiguous at best. Assuming that you and I would like to contribute to a cause greater than mere trolling, we will need a license with a little more substantive language. Enter, the Hippocratic License, created by Coraline Ada Ehmk, of Contributer Covenant fame (yes, the one that broke the Linux Kernel Group). Written in the spirit of the oath sworn by doctors for millennia with 0% of the problematic wording of the original (seriously, go read it, it’s great!), the Hippocratic license embodies the (one hopes) same spirit of the JSON license while deriving its language from international law.
It is truly incredible that individuals are taking a stand for what they believe in ways that go beyond slack-tivism. While changing the terms by which others can use some code you wrote and put on the Internet probably won’t prevent future genocide, we’ve shown that it can help hinder efforts by those who wish to amplify their effectiveness with such tools, albeit indirectly, and if nothing else, sends a message that such actions are not tolerated.
If you have code you wrote and put up on the Internet like I do, please consider updating your licenses, and whether or not you distribute code publicly, consider contributing to further the important work of putting the power of computing to the use of making the world a better place for all of us (and come on, you’re already giving $5 per month to that podcast about Apple computers and magic tricks).
* Nailed it.
References
- Black, Edwin (2009). IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (Paperback) (Second ed.). Washington, DC: Dialog Press. OCLC 958727212.