IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021 - 26

Leading Edge
consists of smaller-scale initiatives whose scopes
are limited to a single open source project, usually
involving a contributor modifying their project's
license to restrict who can use their source code, or
taking their source code off of the internet [6]-[9].
The second category involves a newer, larger-scale
movement that has developed in open
source, where activists draft repurposable open
source licenses that allow any developer to limit
how their work is used. We collectively refer
to these licenses as " ethics-driven licenses. "
An ethics-driven license is usually based on an
already-popular open source license, with an
added stipulation that the software shall not be
used for various activities, ranging from the violation
of human rights, to environmental degradation,
to the violation of labor laws. The goal of these
documents is not to restrict a particular project
from being used by an organization the authors
deem unethical, but rather to give all developers
the agency to prevent their work from being used
in ways they disagree with. Because the anti-LAWS
open source licensing model we study in our
paper is an example of an ethics-driven license,
the reception of existing ethics-driven licenses is
a useful signal for the potential of a license that
prohibits a software's use in LAWS. The three ethics-driven
licenses that have received the most
attention, and which we look at in detail in our
paper, are the Do No Harm License (released
November 2017), the Anti-996 License (released
April 2019), and the Hippocratic License (released
September 2019) [10].
Overall, the open source community's response
to the licenses has been poor: The Do No Harm
License never reached a stable version, the Anti996
License only received adoption by small open
source projects, and the Hippocratic License only
has around 20 projects listed under it [11]-[13].
The weak reception of these political licenses is
not surprising, however. As Coleman observes, the
open source community consistently embraces the
" political agnosticism " of their community [14].
In fact, a handful of core open source community
members have spoken out against the small- and
large-scale activism we have discussed above, arguing
that they are a threat to the open source movement
[15]-[17].
26
Three criteria for success
We found three issues common to ethics-driven
licenses. First, many of the licenses are either
vaguely worded or have too broad a scope to be
meaningful. Second, the legal enforceability of
open source licenses is uncertain, as there has yet
to be a judicial ruling for a license violation claim.
Lastly, the success of ethics-driven licenses requires
that other developers respect, adopt, and contribute
to projects that use these licenses. However,
the open source community has yet to demonstrate
such cohesive support for this activism, with groups
of open source developers who support the initiative
conflicting with those who believe ethics-driven
licenses are a threat to the political agnosticism of
open source.
These issues also allow us to articulate three
success criteria for an ethics-driven license that
support a ban on LAWS: 1) clear and specific language
developed by legal professionals; 2) confirmation
from a credible source of the license's legal
enforceability; and 3) the open source community's
cohesive support of the license. While the first two
criteria-language clarity and legal enforceability-
are likely within reach, obtaining support from the
overall open source community for such a license
is still uncertain. This makes community cohesion
the most difficult success criterion to satisfy and the
ideal focus for future discussions on ethics-driven
licenses.
In summary, we explored the potential of open
source licenses to help regulate the development of
LAWS. While the open source community presently
lacks enough cohesion for such an ethics-driven
license to have practical promise, the ethics-driven
license movement is still developing. The question
of community cohesion may be revisited at a later
date, when there are more ethics-driven licenses,
more discourse surrounding them, more time for
projects to adopt them, and perhaps even an ethics-driven
license focused on LAWS. At the same
time, present activism on the LAWS debate has
mostly been focused on generating traditional forms
of weapons regulation. Given the unique, intangible
nature of LAWS, we should reflect on whether these
efforts bring about a solution with practical accountability
and control mechanisms, and if not, how we
might evaluate and implement new solutions previously
unexplored by export control communities. 
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021

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