Informal thoughts
I think that in the future, the more open a project is, the more likely it is to be picked up by a company and misused. For example, Joseph Redmon’s software was used by the government and he couldn’t really do much about it even thought he was ethically opposed to their use he could only stop working on it. This is a quite pessimistic view of how things are going but I do think that there are many case studies of companies taking over an open source project and kind of missing the point of the project.
For example, Reddis was originally open source but then changed their licence to limit companies like amazon from using the software. Then someone from Amazon made a fork without this restrictive licence and all big companies such as Amazon used it. It could be argued that at least the big companies aren’t directly stealing, as they paid a developer to code the fork however it would’ve been much more ethical to just pay the original developer for the licence to begin with.
New Licences
Server Side Public Licence
Many projects are changing from a GPL to a SSPL because it is useful to software as a service projects to make it so that all derivative works are completely open or the company has to pay them. This stops companies from using software and not reimbursing the creator. SSPL is essentially the same as GPL, just with a small stipulation that derivative works must be completely open or a licence has to be paid for. Therefore it could be argued that although this licence provides more safety for the developer, it isn’t ‘true’ open source.
Ethical source licences
Unlike traditional licences, they prohibit use based on ethical and moral restrictions. For example, as I discussed before the Hippocratic licence just requires derivative works to adhere to the promise of not being used to harm others. However, as I said, these sorts of licences are hard to enforce without a lot of money, as in the Joseph Redmon case, unless you are prepared to sue a whole government, it is hard to actually enforce these licences.
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