China uses face recognition technology to calculate Uyghur Muslims. The US military uses drones to kill terror suspects , as well as civilians nearby. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Police - the very ones that kept their children in cages near the Mexican border - rely on software for communication and coordination, like all modern organizations.
Someone has to write code that makes all this possible. Increasingly, developers are calling on their employers and the government to stop using their work for unethical purposes. Google employees persuaded the company to stop work on analyzing drone records , and also to cancel all plans for tendering for cloud computing for the Pentagon. Microsoft employees protested the company's collaboration with the Immigration Police and the military, albeit with minimal success.
However, it is quite difficult to prevent companies or governments from using already written software, especially when this software is in the public domain. Last month, for example, Seth Vargo removed part of his open source software (open source) from online repositories in protest against its potential use by the Immigration Police. However, since the open source code can be freely copied and distributed, all the remote code was very soon available in other sources.
Coraline Ida Emki wants to give her fellow programmers more control over how their software is used. Software released under its new “Hippocratic License” can be distributed and modified for any purpose, with one big exception: software cannot be used by individuals, corporations, governments, or other groups in systems or for activities that actively and intentionally endanger , cause harm, or otherwise threaten the physical or mental health, as well as the economic or other well-being of individuals or groups of people, in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights OH.
Clearly defining what “harm” means is inherently a complex and controversial issue, however, Emki hopes that linking this license to existing international standards will help reduce uncertainty in this matter. “The Declaration of Human Rights is a document with a 70-year history, widely adopted for its definition of harm, and what exactly is a violation of human rights,” Emki said.
Of course, this is a rather bold proposal, but Emki is known just for such statements . In 2014, she wrote the first version of the rules of conduct for open source projects called the Code of Conduct for Participants. At first, she was greeted with skepticism, but more than 40,000 open source projects have already adopted these rules, from the Google platform for the TensorFlow AI, to the Linux kernel.
True, at the moment, few people publish material under the "Hippocratic License", even Emki herself does not use it yet. The license still needs to go through legal approvals, for which Emki hired a lawyer, plus there are various obstacles, including compatibility with other licenses that you have to deal with somehow.
Emki agrees that changing how engineers license their work alone will not stop human rights violations. However, she wants to give people a tool to deter various companies, governments, or other unfriendly structures from using their code to commit crimes.
The non-profit organization Open Source Initiative said that open source software "should not discriminate against individuals or groups of individuals" and "should not restrict anyone in trying to use programs in certain areas of work."
Whether human rights violations are “specific areas of work” remains to be dealt with ( approx. Lane. There is an abundance of sarcasm here), since Emki has not yet formally submitted her “Hippocratic License” to OSI for review. However, in a tweet last month, the organization indicated that this license does not fit the definition of free software. OSI co-founder Bruce Pirens also wrote on his blog that this license contradicts the definition their organization gave.
Emki hopes to unite the community of open source developers to put pressure on OSI to change their definition, or to create a new one. “I believe the OSI definition is terribly outdated,” Emki said. “At the moment, the open source community simply does not have the tools in its hands to prevent the use of our technologies, for example, by the Nazis.”
Emki's concerns are shared by other developers. Michael Cafferella, co-founder of the popular open source data processing platform Hadoop, saw how his tools were used for purposes he could not imagine, including the National Security Agency. “It’s good if people start to think about who and how uses their software. Personally, I am most worried about abuses by undemocratic states that have significant engineering resources to modify and deploy new projects. “I don’t have the necessary experience to say whether this (the Hippocratic License) will be enough to stop such abuses,” he said.
Attempts to modify open source definitions to take into account ethical issues have a rather long and controversial history. Emki is far from the first to try to write a license that would prevent the use of open source for the purpose of harm. So peer-to-peer computing utility GPU: a Global Processing Unit was released in 2006 under a license prohibiting its use by the military. So far, such measures have had little effect, but this may change. Earlier this year, dozens of software projects adopted the Anti-996 license, which requires users to comply with both local and international labor standards, in response to news about disgusting working conditions in Chinese technology companies. Emki hopes that the public reaction to the actions of the U.S. Immigration Police, which has spread far beyond the technology sector, could be a turning point.
Some point to the possibility of adopting a new term for code that is open to use by some individuals but closed to others. “Perhaps we should stop calling our software“ open ”and call it“ open for good purposes, ” wrote Vargo , the same programmer who had previously deleted his code in protest against the Immigration Police, in his tweet .
The term “open source software” was adopted in the late 1990s as an alternative to “free software”, and at that time was associated with certain ideological issues. And now, as developers become more and more ideologically inclined, perhaps the time has come for another term to appear.