On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 9:45 PM Eric Schultz <e...@wwahammy.com> wrote:
> The idea for the Persona non Grata Preamble came from the preamble in the GPL > families of license and ideas I have around excluding bad actors from > communities using an advanced Code of Conduct. In this idea, a community > would add a preamble to an existing license. In the preamble, the license > would include statements from the community about their values, who is not > welcome in their community, such as fascists, ICE collaborators, > organizations who take but never give back, oil and gas companies and others. > In more aggressive cases, the preamble could list the bad actors and even > make statements about why they are excluded from the community. (This is > where the name Persona non Grata Preamble comes from). First, thanks for starting this discussion. My reaction is that I see a big difference between a preamble that talks about values and sufficiently general or abstract descriptions of who is not welcome in a community , and what you call "more aggressive" cases that actually name particular bad actors. I could see the former category as being consistent with what I think of as open source or OSD-conformant *maybe*, in some cases, but probably not the latter. A license that has a preamble that singles out a particular individual, or organization, or even a specifically-described group, might have the effect of discouraging exercise of the nominally-granted license permissions by the singled-out person/entity/group. I mean, I think that is actually one of your goals, right? There was a recent Twitter discussion of badgeware licenses. One of the problems with badgeware licenses, brought up by people on this mailing list long ago, was that their "attribution" requirements were actually calculated to discourage the licensee from exercising the derivative work right. I see a related problem with this proposal -- though again it seems to me it depends on how general the category of called-out person is. > As is relevant to this list, this preamble, while shaming and discouraging > evil orgs, would be written in a way which does not add any binding > obligations on the community or users. By doing so, it fully complies with > the OSD and FSD. This is the assertion I would take issue with, for at least some of the kinds of licenses you're imagining. > 7. Is the net-benefit sufficient to any additional risk for marginalized > people? This list absolutely cannot decide this but it's relevant enough to > need to discuss this. If this mechanism becomes common, there is a distinct > risk that marginalized people could be added to these persona non grata > lists. In cases of harassment, legally or otherwise, this would lead to these > individuals being put into a document where they could not easily be removed. > As an examples, queer people particularly in countries with anti-queer laws, > or sexual assault survivors. Undoubtedly, these lists could be added to > licenses right now. They could, but would such licenses be OSI-approvable? I'd assume and hope not. I guess you're assuming that they would be, since there's no obvious objective principle to explain why (for lack of a better label) "progressive" persona-non-grata-preamble licenses are acceptable from an OSD-conformance perspective, but anti-progressive ones aren't -- similar to a concern I have about some of the ethical source licenses. Overall, I think this is a pretty bad idea, at least for preambles that take the "aggressive" approach, which I assume would attract the most interest. Richard -- Richard Fontana He / Him / His Senior Commercial Counsel Red Hat, Inc. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
