Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Change license to an ethical one #142

Open
qwertyytr000 opened this issue Sep 25, 2021 · 4 comments
Open

Change license to an ethical one #142

qwertyytr000 opened this issue Sep 25, 2021 · 4 comments

Comments

@qwertyytr000
Copy link

The MIT license may carry bigoted ideas so switching to an ethical open source license is ideal

Here is the list of approved licenses, i personally recommend The Hippocratic License but all of them are good

@cognitivegears
Copy link
Contributor

Interesting - I could definitely see the uses for these. Respectfully, however, I disagree with changing the license in this particular case. I believe in this case it needs to be taken into context - the woke tool is very specific in it's functionality, and it is hard to consider a usage of finding non-inclusive technical terms within source code that would be useful in the furtherance of abuses of human rights. Furthermore, I believe a good goal of the woke tool is to be used by as many companies as possible, and many companies have open source software approval processes that depend on the approval of current, known licenses. For these companies, using a different license would likely trigger a legal audit of that license at best, incurring additional cost, or outright declining of the software at worst. Again, I totally am not against the ideas of these licenses in principle, but my suggestion would be to wait to consider adoption for the woke tool specifically until these licenses have gained broad adoption and are already on the (hopefully) allow-list for most companies.

@qwertyytr000
Copy link
Author

Ethical source licenses need to be used to gain broad adoption and be approved by companies. woke is already one of the leading tools used to combat online hate so it adopting a ethical license would be of immense help in the fight for human rights

@caitlinelfring
Copy link
Member

caitlinelfring commented Sep 28, 2021

Thanks for the suggestion! I don't think I'll be relicensing woke right now. I agree with @cognitivegears comment. If there was a public commitment from companies that they would accept re-licensing of MIT to an approved ethical license without question, I would consider it. But woke isn't a big enough project yet and I'd rather see wider option of it before changing licenses.

woke is already one of the leading tools used to combat online hate

I'm happy to hear that, but sadly the list of companies that acknowledge this publicly is very small and I have no other way of knowing if companies use woke internally to know how widely used it is or what the impact of a change like this would be.

That said, I am happy to leave this issue open to allow feedback from the rest of the community on this.

@lyiriyah
Copy link

lyiriyah commented Oct 9, 2021

@qwertyytr000 Do you mind explaining how the MIT license is bigoted?

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

4 participants