"I would encourage anyone who supports Donald Trump as president of the USA or who agrees with his racist statements to desist from using this code."
Is there someway an open source license could be written to explicitly state that supporters of Donald Trump may not use it?
update
Thanks to the suggestion by @notacoward I have decided to go for the following wording instead:
This ReadMe document and/or the following statement may not be removed from this project or any works that derive from it: The creator of PropertyWebBuilder is opposed to the racist statements made by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign of 2016 and would prefer that supporters of Donald Trump do not use this project.
Trump supporters are persons you know, just like gay people, blacks or immigrants. What difference do you see between your attitude and the average Trump supporter's one ?
Associating and supporting someone who hates all of the above is a choice.
See the difference now?
This link below is a thoughtful review of some of the evidence. You are, of course, free to disagree.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...
So instead of creating better arguments in the support of your political beliefs, you're telling people to just pretend to be on your side.
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
There is no such thing as pro-life or pro-choice open source software.
Also, is it discrimination if I give users a choice? You can use my software whoever you are, you just have to disagree with racism.
It carries the weight of the names of the people who support it. Take a look at who is involved in it. Ian Murdock, founder of Debian, is a co-founder for the OSI.
Also, is it discrimination if I give users a choice? You can use my software whoever you are, you just have to disagree with racism.
Rephrasing it doesn't change anything.
The concrete problems is that this license with the no-Trump-supporters clause will not be compatible with most of the license that most people think when someone talk as a open source or free software. So for most people this will not be open source or free software.
(I'm not a lawyer, so please get someone to review my opinions.)
* You can't copy code from GPL/LGPL licensed software to your project, and someone else can't copy code from your project to a GPL/LGPL project.
This is important if you are planning to copy any code from a GPL/LGPL library.
* You can copy code from MIT/BSD licensed software to your project, but someone else can't copy code from your project to a MIT/BSD project.
Hey, you can even copy code from a MIT/BSD to a project that has a license that allow to use it only for evil purposes, like killing kitties.
IANAL.
Generalization and bigotry will only bring us 8 years of Trump. This sort of behavior is exactly why people voted Trump into power in the first place: instead of actually having civil conversations and understanding the opposition, you attempt to silence and destroy your opponents through passive-aggressive tactics, shaming, lying, and laws.
Learn from your mistakes and we might have better leaders in the future.
Not to mention, he's made several very bigoted statements that helped him get elected.
I don't recall any other candidates doing anything remotely similar to what he's done.
Bigotry is different than dissuading others from supporting Trump(who is a bigot).
The electoral college is now considered 'gamed'? This has pretty much been how a president is elected since the United States was founded. If Hillary or Bernie were actually trying to get the popular vote, their campaign trails would have looked much different. They were trying to 'game' the system too (but failed).
"and actively encouraging foreign intervention in our election."
Hillary had 30,000 missing emails and Trump made a joke about Russia. Jokes aren't supposed to be taken seriously. We also still have no proof Russia hacked anything. I have access to IP addresses in Russia. It doesn't mean I'm in Russia or Russian. I will believe it when I see the proof.
"I don't recall any other candidates doing anything remotely similar to what he's done."
You mean like when Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton blame both the wealthy and white people for all of our country's problems?
"Bigotry is different than dissuading others from supporting Trump(who is a bigot)."
Trump isn't a bigot. Many of the 'bigoted' things that you see in the mainstream media were completely taken out of context or were outright lies. I watched his live speeches and then saw the resulting media coverage. It was ridiculously bad.
Is Trump going to be a good president? Only time will tell. He's not even in power yet.
I'm glad you feel it's okay to be bigoted against a person as long as it's not on the list of protected classes.
Many on HN love to smoke weed. Would it be okay, in your opinion, if all companies got together and had mandatory, monthly, drug tests, and fired anyone that had any level of THC in their system?
After all, the government can only give you the freedom of speech, right? (this is the argument I keep hearing when someone wants to be bigoted against another (usually on the left) after the Trump election)
When you start to encourage the singling out (and generalizing) of people based on things such as political opinions, it creates a world where you lose your freedoms and the only people that come out on top are the wealthy and those in power.
Yes I am judging you philosophically (you're "open sourcing" something but being closed minded. It's as offensive as saying "I don't want any Russians using my code"), but also being realistic and trying to give you a constructive criticism. It's already hard to get traction for ANY open source project no matter how open you license it. That's why people say use MIT license or don't bother.
What will probably happen when you DO manage to open source it this way: The worst case: nobody would care. The best case scenario is your repo will go viral and you'll get tons of troll comments for what has nothing to do with your code. If that's what you want go ahead, but as a programmer I would rather be judged by the code quality and what the project does.
If you read this far, let's imagine in this case your project was actually a groundbreaking innovative piece of technology that no one has released before. Here's what will happen: some other "non trump supporter" will take your code and release it as their own as MIT, and people will use that instead while you're busy dealing with trump supporters trolling your github repo.
If you really want to make a moral statement at the cost of your code being unusable by any open source project, corporation or other entity that cares about following licenses, you might want to consider just adding the
The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.
http://www.json.org/license.html
edit: I should be clear that, like the response says, this still wouldn't be an open source license, and it would be a pain in the ass for anyone wanting to use it. I'm just saying, at least this clause looks somehat idealistic and not just pure trolling.
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4702...
Partisan threads are bad enough without stooping to this. Please edit out name-calling from your comments here, as the HN guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Last year, a german developer did that, because he disagreed with the policies of the European Union.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/11/paper-retracted-after...
That's were you see the notion of country is a great invention: you can gather all the non racists in a country, and all the racists in other countries (classified by races), and then everybody is happy. But of course, don't distribute your products cross borders: establish tariffs and rules for importation and exportation.
Possible alternative: require preservation of a copyright notice which (among all the usual stuff) condemns Trump and his policies. It gives voice to your protest, without the definitional hassles that enforcing a restriction would have.
Perhaps something along the lines of:
This ReadMe document and/or the following statement may not be removed from this project or any works that derive from it:
The creator of PropertyWebBuilder is opposed to the racist statements made by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign of 2016.
Are you a supporter if you hope that he will be a good president now that he's been elected? Because, you know, he's going to be the president anyway and it would be nice to have a good one.
Also - what are the "racist statements" of Donald Trump? Is it really true that he made "racist statements"? Or are you talking about statements that might be racist if given the most uncharitable interpretation?
> But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all > (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, > including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby > mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.
Theo de Raadt cvs@openbsd.org mailing list, May 29, 2001
Various Licenses and Comments about Them (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html)
You can do whatever you want, but I think it would be much more constructive to use your project as a platform for what you believe in, rather than against certain sets of people.
For one thing, I think we have to recognize that there are common principles we can build broad consensus around. For many people who voted for Trump, their vote was the last action in a chain of reasoning that diverged in some point from common ground. My hope for the future is that we can win many of these people back by presenting alternative (and far more positive, equitable, and realistic) pathways to meet their needs than the regressive, reactionary worldview Trump represents.
At the end of the day, democracy is about building consensus, not shutting out the people who may driving us mad or even deeply offending us. If you want a more inclusive future, you have to fight for the hearts and minds of people who initially disagree with you.
Picking on "Trump supporters" is a pretty low blow. And in practical terms is probably pointless -- basically just virtue signalling[0].
I know it's hard to know what to do, but if we're going to make a positive change in the world, we're all going to have to do better than this.
The rest is trivial.
If not -- then this doesn't seem possible.
If yes -- then maybe.
.....
That said, from an editorial perspective, I find this very troubling.
More and more in America, we attempt to shame others based on what we perceive as their intentions and internally held beliefs and attitudes.
In objective reality, we can never fully know or understand what someone else is feeling, or what they intend. (At least as far as I am aware.)
Yet many of us still pretend we can, denouncing and shaming others because of their perceived intolerant or hateful beliefs. And, it's becoming socially acceptable, sometimes even encouraged... forgive me, but this whole idea is extraordinarily surreal.
EDIT: What makes this doubly strange - if this were satire, it would be funny.
You're better off saying the software can't be used to produce trolling bots. You have a better case there.
Yes.
> Can I exclude Trump supporters in my open source license?
No, because that license would not be open source. [1]
By the FSF definition of "free", this might be an unfree (restrictive) license. But that neednt stop you. Still, an aspirational statement of what you wish to support and further is likely more productive.
Just put in simple plain language what you want to exclude. If you find someone violated your terms (most people do not read them), then it's on you to drag them into court and prove that they were a Trump supporter and to define that term.