Fundamentally, it depends on the license. When this came up under Bush 43, the appeal was "the military is not allowed to use this!" and RMS and many others pointed out terms like this. This one is from the GPL v3 specifically:

> All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met. This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program.

Other licenses have similar clauses and a short list of requirements which must be met. Since the relevant groups, agencies, etc were (and presumably are) meeting the requirements, there's no grounds to revoke the license.

iirc, the Open Source Initiative stated that any claims/requirements limiting who could use the software or where they could use it would not meet the definition of "open source."

The license for JSON is an example of this. https://www.json.org/license.html

> The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

IBM requested, and received, an exemption...

> I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.

which apparently pleased their lawyers.

Such licenses exist, and yes. But it wouldn’t apply retroactively.

I guess it would be enforceable. The problem with those sorts of license restrictions are that in general no one will use code licensed that way.

It's under Apache license. I think the ethics of code placed under that license include "you may use this; you may rely on being able to continue to use this; if you don't like the direction the main package is taking for whatever reason, you may fork it and [optionally] release your fork under Apache as well."

Is it unethical, though? The entire point of OSS is that you cannot revoke the license once granted. A hostile fork is the expected result of Chef's actions.

The zeroth freedom is the freedom to use the software for any purpose whatsoever. That inherently must include purposes which the author finds unethical, even abhorrent.

If forking a public github repo is unethical we are all screwed.