Feel free to create the "moral/ethical software" movement, but please don't touch the current definition of free software.
People already have a hard time understanding what free software exactly is/requires/provides. Changing the definition at this point would only create confusion, especially if the new one is even more ethically grounded.
Agree. Don't touch definitions. For example, some people were not fine with the definition of "free software", so they coined the term "open source software" to line out their views on the topic.
I think "social" or "ethical" software could be a reasonable term for the views proposed.
That being said, and IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that such ideas would not held in court, unless the "unethical behaviour" is illegal. But in this case, why should criminals stick to software licences?
Agree. I think the strength of free software is that it's making a single ethical point (which is hard enough to get across.) I support anybody wanting to make "ethical" software, but it's 1) not the same thing as free software and 2) very difficult to make an ethical tool; people find it hard enough to explain their personal ethical distinctions, I definitely don't want to listen to a some hammer's idiosyncratic belief system.
Say you develope a targeting algorithm to be used by a robotic arm with a water pistol — wouldn’t it then be totally legitimate to say: you are allowed to use this freely, as long as you don’t use it with a real gun?
The non commercial clause in the creative commons is also sth like this: free for non-commercial usage, all others have to ask.
I don’t see why authors shouldn’t be allowed to excert at least a little bit of control what their creations are used for, if they like to do so.
> The non commercial clause in the creative commons is also sth like this: free for non-commercial usage, all others have to ask.
Perfectly fine. But then it's not free software, or in this case free creative work. It's as you said: it's free only for some which makes it unfree in general.
Let's say you write such targeting software and I make hardware using it. I add a sticker saying "don't put a real gun into it" on it. Are we good? Or is it like "known to cause cancer in California" stuff?
What do you consider free software? Because I don't consider anything licensed under GPL as free, but I would consider software licensed under MIT or BSD as free.
To answer your question: probably any software following the widely accepted, opinion-free definition of "free software".
Can you run it? Read its code? Redistribute it verbatim? Make modifications to the code for private use? Redistribute the modifications? Then it's free software.
You are free not to like some free software licenses though.
> Can you run it? Read its code? Redistribute it verbatim? Make modifications to the code for private use? Redistribute the modifications? Then it's free software.
Your answer proves that GP has a point: Commons Clause (on top of Apache for instance) fits your requirements perfectly, yet it is not "free software" according to FSF/OSI definitions.
There are degrees to freedom, and while FOSS activists would like to paint issues black and white, they really are not. Which freedoms a particular user cares about is not at all given. For myself, I would gladly use Commons Clause software, because if I make money off software then it's only fair that I pay commercial license for it - after all, it's in my interest that the software is actively developed and maintained. And your questions are really all I care about, and this clause conforms to them.
But I think in the end it is up to each user to decide which set of freedoms they care about to the point of not using non-conforming software. The cynic in me would say that most users care only about free (as in beer) - at least judging by Android and plethora of its free-of-cost apps.
EDIT: I am not arguing that Commons Clause & co. should be accepted under the "free license" term - for better or worse, this term has some widely accepted definition that is not compatible with them. Maybe a new term, like "hybrid licenses" is needed? We'll see.
Indeed. The actual definition says: "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)."
I simplified too much.
To GP:
> There are degrees to freedom, and while FOSS activists would like to paint issues black and white, they really are not
There are software that are free software, and software that are not free software. This is the whole point of a good definition. Actually assessing whether a program is free software might be hard, but at the end no software is between free software and non-free software.
Now we can argue on a level of freedom but we are not talking about this definition anymore.
I'm not sure Commons Clause even meets those informal requirements.
You can't run Commons Clause software if you're receiving payment for doing so. You can't redistribute Commons Clause software verbatim if you're receiving payment for doing so. (As written, it even appears to prohibit selling a CD of the software for the cost of the blank CD, a service that's otherwise widely accepted as a useful community contribution.)
Because the Commons Clause restricts the situations in which you can run and redistribute the software, software licensed under it isn't free software.
That's a good point - but of course I wasn't arguing that Commons Clause is "free software" (as defined by OSI/FSF). I do however believe that it solves a true problem that free software evangelists keep pretending doesn't exist, and it does so in a way which leaves user with much more freedoms than other proprietary licenses.
Is it free software? No. Does it allow many more freedoms than closed source? Hell yes. Is that enough? We'll see.
And by the way, Linus Torvalds is closer to the open source initiative that to the free software foundation, which he does not like much, but his preferred license is the GPLv2.
People already have a hard time understanding what free software exactly is/requires/provides. Changing the definition at this point would only create confusion, especially if the new one is even more ethically grounded.