Omninerd re a refusal to share Open Source with the military

A revision to the Google toolbar showed a site, Omninerd, as available. On that site, I found that:

"An open source project, Global Processing Unit, has just modified its General Public License (GPL) to include a no military use clause. GPU is a Gnutella client that provides an extensible framework for distributed computing on P2P grids. In other words, it allows computers to share resources. The license modification states, 'The program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed.' Lead developer, Tiziano Mengotti says, 'Open source operating systems can steer warplanes and rockets. [This] patch should make clear to users of the software that this is definitely not allowed by the licenser.'"

Comments were invited whether this was a good idea: I thought it was a good idea. Following is the text of my comments, also posted at Omninerd: also see an apolitical article: about "how to program a bootstrap loader" which is about being able to load an OS or utility onto a barenaked computer: this is an experience a real geek should have, and I had it...jillions of years ago.

Here are my comments on the Open Source nonmilitary clause:

GPU's license change is not counter to the philosophy of open source since a communicative act, such as allowing another person to use software you have written without consideration, demands a quantum of mutual trust and respect.

The military needs to reduce the scope of such mutual acts using friend or foe identification and deny the foe the right, prior to a truce, to communicate in this fashion.

The authoring of open source is made from a humanistic standpoint in which acts of sharing and mutual trust are considered more human than acts of force or fraud, including the provision of minimally adequate closed source for a maximal return. Open source starts with Rousseau's view of humanity as born free and equal and able through acts of mutual trust create a sustainable society, and it looks forward to an increase and not a decrease in the scope of this mutuality (such as was seen, NOT courtesy of US military power, when the Berlin wall went down and the Internet extended to the formerly Communist countries).

Closed source's intellectual origins, on the other hand, start with Hobbes' presumption that in the state of nature men war "all against all" and proceeds to the somewhat Adam Smithian view (not in fact fully held by the author of The Wealth of Nations) that the only salvation for this "original sin" lies in the grace of the Invisible Hand. In closed source, the vendor systematically lowers the quality of the product while increasing the pressure on his hired creators while having a distinct "marketing" group extract, through the process Galbraith called the innocent fraud, the maximal amount of up-front cash from the hapless, over a barrel, and network-externalized customer who reasons in the absence of full information and in the presence of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

I conclude that the Open Source movement should as a matter of course insert the above clause in its formal agreements for the SAME reason Asimov, in his Foundation series, developed the first law of robotics, that no robot shall harm a human being.

Otherwise, the logic of the militarized corporate state shall be to PREVENT other users of the open source code from fully using their product. Furthermore, the law that those who modify open source shall send their changes to a repository will otherwise be violated systematically by the military, who will use the Open Source to create a hyperclosed, militarized source.

The military will never give back to the community except in the de minimis sense of Toys for Tots, the United States Marines' public relations stunt to conceal the fact that the devil dogs are, as USMC General Smedley Butler confessed in 1933, the hired gunsels of US companies. I predict in fact that any military giveback to Open Source will be a public relations stunt *simpliciter* and internally labeled as Toys for Tots.

Not preventing military use will make the authors of open source directly responsible for such horrors as occur in the use of high-energy weapons as are being used as I write by Israel in Lebanon. Misunderstood as "precision" these weapons as a matter of course kill children in the crowded target cities and flat blocks to the extent that the MAJORITY of Lebanese casualties are not only Lebanese civilians, as is reported in the Western media, they are also children.

Kant saw that an unethical activity is that which destroys its foundation: is unsustainable. The sharing of Open Source started in peaceful, well-lit university environments of mutual trust created by a legally enforced absence of racial discrimination and the cultural changes of the 1960s which did their part to create a more open environment than the software world of the 1950s.

For this software world to participate in the creation of Cities of Dreadful Night where no software can be created, much less shared, is in a Kantian sense a violation of the Categorical Imperative, so act that your action may be recommended as a general moral law. The use of high technology by the United States to check, channel and control foreign aspirations for a better life has already come home to roost on September 11, which was an example of the sort of blowback that can and will occur when Open Source becomes part of the war machine.

spinoza1111 (Edward G. Nilges)