Re: documentation on un-enforceability of ethical licenses? (was Re: License Review Request - Anu Initiative

Roland Turner via License-discuss <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.licenses.open-source.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 7/2/24 01:45, Pamela Chestek wrote:

> Instead I think it's a practical problem. Licenses are not
> self-enforcing, someone has to bring a legal claim for enforcement. Only
> the licensor can enforce the contract (unless the license has a third
> party beneficiary, in which case the third party can enforce it only
> insofar as that party's interest is impacted). Is the licensor going to
> become the ethics police of the world, committing resources to go after
> every use that breaches the ethics provision?

I suspect that this is the literal intention of at least some of the 
proposed "ethical" licenses[1]. The desire to gain discretionary power 
over others is an understandable one — particularly in contested 
political spaces — but probably not one that OSI has much to gain by 
facilitating, for example by approving a discriminatory license.

- Roland


1: I have no idea about the motivations of the Anu Initiative in this 
respect.


_______________________________________________
The opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and not necessarily those of the Open Source Initiative. Official statements by the Open Source Initiative will be sent from an opensource.org email address.

License-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.