Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)

It is incompatible with all widely adopted definitions of Free software. If you restrict who can use your software, how, or for what purpose, it's fundamentally unfree.

The term that doesn't make any claims about whether a piece of software respects user freedoms is source-available, which these "everyone except the bad guys" licenses are commonly categorized as.

Any such license is basically impossible to work with. It amounts to "I reserve the right to sue anyone who uses this software in the future for effectively random reasons". Because I could go on about the lack of a universally agreed-upon "good" or "evil" and the fact that what you call evil is people who think they are being good (the number of people who outright identify themselves as evil is a rounding error), but there's an even bigger problem, which is that who you think is evil today may change over time. How is anyone supposed to keep up with that? If you put a license like this on your software and you decide eightteen months from now that actually $POLITICAL_STANCE, which you previously thought was evil, has a point, and then you-four-years-from-now comes around to the idea that what they thought was good when they wrote the license is actually quite evil, what is any user of your code supposed to do with that?

In general, $YOUR opinions are too flighty to be basing licensing decisions on.

There's a generally established exception for military use, which works anyhow because even if you are hypothetically perfectly morally fine with military use you may not want to permit them to use it on the grounds you haven't tested it enough. See also the perfectly well-established "not to be used on medical devices" exemption. But if you want to conditionalize your license on, say, "whether or not you're willing to sign this petition about $POLITICAL_TOPIC", that's not something anyone can build on. It'll be a terminal license in the code tree.

If this means you don't want to contribute to open source because you are unwilling to accept this... by all means! If you don't like a contract, don't sign it. Nobody's forcing you to write open source software for free. But there isn't a practical "well, what if only people I agree with are allowed to use it" option, because then even the people you agree with today really can't base any significant decisions on that sort of foundation.

(And, in general, anyone who lives, say, 25 years, and has absolutely no changes of political opinion in that time period... yeah... that's probably a bad sign. I don't hate 25-year-ago-me or anything, but I've got a lot of disagreements with him, and I don't expect 25-year-from-now-me to completely agree with me today either. Certainly not enough to write anything into a license agreement.)

Finally, as another practical manner, this license is also signing up to someday appear in some court of law to litigate the matter of whether or not some person or other does or does not agree with you on some political matter, in a situation where it will be a judge deciding that and not you, and wow am I just not being paid enough for my free contributions to open source to go through that under any circumstances.

Terrible article. The whole style is annoying but let me just quote two things.

> The funniest thing is when Cuck Licensers complain that people are abiding by their licenses. They will complain that people took their code and made money off of it. They will complain when they don't get some social credit they feel like they deserve when their code is used in a project. They will complain if people fork their project and it becomes more popular than the original. They will complain when some tech giant takes their code and makes spyware out of it.

None of these things are prevented by making your code GPL. GPL only means that if they distribute the software, they also have to distribute the source. There is no requirement to provide “social capital”, to not make money or to not put spyware in it.

> With Cuck Licenses, you get the worst of two worlds: You get no credit for your work, […]

BSD-style licenses require attribution when distributing the software. So if Intel distributed MINIX, they had to put the license and Andrew Tanenbaum’s copyright notice somewhere in their documentation. That’s why we get all those screenshots of curl being in things.

No, they merely feel the effects of the code, but they do not use it.

Is there a differentiation between nationalism and patriotism?

I happen to think that the Founders had a (generally) better set of ideas in 1787, and that those ideas are being replaced by ersatz slogans.