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[ox-en] Ethical Licenses



Dear Stefan,

In your very interesting contribution, which I have mentioned, cited on my blog, you mention ethical licenses and that they are not used

I know, among the equity-based licenses such as http://p2pfoundation.net/Equity-based_Licenses, of the iang license, ecopyfarleft, and the user ownership proposals ... Are you aware of any others, I'd like to complete the list,

Michel


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Also I'd probably should make clear that Oekonux is not part of the
Free Software movement - at least not in a narrow sense. There are
some Free Software developers here but there are also a lot of other
people here. Also Oekonux doesn't develop Free Software but analyzes
Free Software and other phenomenons.

This is a point where there is usually some disagreement. Oekonux
comes more from a perspective on productive forces and their
mechanics. This is not about ethics. Two points.

I think Free Software gained momentum **only** because it is
non-discriminatory as far as use of the software is concerned. Would
the licenses discriminate against certain uses you would run into a
couple of problems immediately:

* Where to draw the line?

  On ethical grounds it is very hard to draw the line about good and
  bad. Because the form of rights Free Software gives you is expressed
  by a license you need to encode good and bad in the license. This is
  difficult to achieve in the first place and it is very difficult to
  maintain in practice.

  In effect you would have a license where only very few persons can
  be sure that they have the rights the license promises. As a Free
  Software user you'll never know whether the copyright holder will
  sue you because on ethical ground s/he thinks you have no right to
  use the Free Software.

* Different opinions would scare away good developers

  If you had such ethical licenses there are certainly bright
  developers who would not share the ethical standards encoded in a
  certain license. In effect they would not join a Free Software
  project - or create another one with a less restrictive license.

  This would be probably lead to separated worlds with less
  restrictive and more restrictive licenses making combination of Free
  Software a nightmare. Again this would severely damage the general
  utility of Free Software.

  And BTW: If you check which ideological fights including forks Free
  Software developers already have about *existing* non-ethical
  licenses I'd not like to imagine what would happen with ethical
  licenses...

Leftist people usually have a hard time to accept that the Free
Software movement is heterogeneous as far as ethics are concerned.
Indeed there are important people which IMHO have very questionable
political opinions.

However, if you look at the development of productive forces this does
not matter at all. A new form of production gains power whether it is
ethical in terms of the ancient system or not. This was similar with
capitalism BTW which indeed gained a lot from the wars of the feudals.

On the contrary to me it is a very good sign that the germ form is
*not* rooted in ethical / political grounds. To me political forms
have proven to not be able to overcome capitalism. And this is logical
if you accept that the *real* power of capitalism comes from the way
of production - and *this* power is undermined by Free Software.

I'd agree that as a result this not automatically means that a GPL
society based on the principles of the development of Free Software
means a better place in terms of a mind coined by a capitalist
environment. However, as far as I can see a GPL society will remove
crucial problems of capitalism - namely the importance of alienated
relationships.

ETHICS/POLITICS
Finally, I'd like to say that the reason I brought up form versus  
content as something to think about is because mostly what open  
software does is to build a form (of software) collectively.  How  
that form gets used is not necessarily your concern it seems, but I  
ask you to think about what that means in terms of ethics.

Indeed there are ethical licenses. They simply get not used.

If your  
collectively constructed form of software is used for building  
weapons or for spying on people or who knows what else, then it seems
  
to me that you need to have a discussion on how ethically you want to
  
make this work available -- what kinds of limitations should you  
place and what kind of use can these forms have?

I'd find it more interesting to think about political forms based on
the principles of the development of Free Software to prevent this. I
think in a GPL society where alienation plays no big role a lot of
reasons for what seems like an abuse will be gone.

I just want you to know that with each  
technological invention capitalism has not been overcome as you may  
hope this new stage will do -- but rather it becomes subject to many
  
uses not all of them beneficial, and more often than not new  
technologies often allow for different kinds of accumulation of  
capital that did not exist before -- meaning new kinds of imbalances
  
in resources too where some will have more and more and other less  
and less.

Agreed. However, capitalism has been transformed by technological
inventions like the assembly line.

The point is that in Oekonux we say that Free Software - and other
Free Projects - are stronger in terms of productivity / quality than
the capitalist way of production. That is Free Projects attack the
very stronghold of capitalism. Though Free Software as we know it
would probably not be possible without the Internet technology and
certainly not without digital copy this would not be important if
there would be no different mode of production.

And this is exactly my question to the art community: Are there
similar observations? Is payed art or art created because of an order
better / worse / same in quality than Doubly Free Art? I'd really
would be interested in this.

Interesting sub-questions would be: How many (regularly) paid artists
are there? How successful is Doubly Free Art in galleries / museums /
[whatever way users of art choose to distribute art]?


                        Grüße

                        Stefan
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Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de






       
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