Seems pretty unethical to me. Exercising a liberty in direct contradiction to its creator’s wishes for personal gain with no recompense to them is about as crassly selfish and non-prosocial as it gets. Perhaps your ethics don’t include “being prosocial towards those whose work benefits you”? That’s the usual difference I encounter between my ethics and those who disagree that it’s crass — and I do respect such differing beliefs.

Note that I’m not faulting you for behaving this way, no insult or disparagement intended, etc.! Open source inherited this dissonance between giving it all away to anyone who asks for free, and giving nothing of yours back in return because prosocial is not an ethical standard, from its predecessor belief system. It remains unsolved decades later, in both open source and libertarianism, and I certainly don’t hold generic exploiters of the prosocial-imbalance defect accountable for the underlying flaw in both belief systems.

If the authors wanted to disallow people to be free (as in freedom) to change the source code for free (as in beer), then the authors had every chance to publish the source code under a more restrictive license.

I’m trying to imagine how this might be unethical. The only scenario I can think of is if the authors wanted the code to not be modified in certain ways, but felt based on more deeply held principles that the code should be made FOSS. But I struggle to see how both ideas could exist simultaneously - if you think code should be free then you think there is no ethical issue with people modifying it to fit their use.

Yep, that’s the struggle in a nutshell!

If you believe in giving away code because that’s open-source prosocial, then open-source adherents will claim that taking advantage of you is ethical, because if you didn’t want to be exploited, you shouldn’t have been open-source prosocial in the first place. And by treating “pay me if you get paid for my code” licenses as treated as evil and shameful, exploiters place pressures on prosocial maintainers into adopting open source licenses, even though they’ll then be exploited by people who don’t care about being prosocial, eventually burning out the maintainer who either silent-quits or rage-quits.

Of course, if OSI signed off on “if you get rich from my source code you have to share some of that wealth back to me” as a permissible form of clause in open source licensing, that would of course break the maintainer burnout cycle — but I’m certainly not holding my breath.

That only applies if author wants to call software "Open Source". You can license it under "SourceAvailableForSmallGuy" with no resistance.

I think there will be at least some resistance to any license that isn't largely unrestricted.

But I do agree that this is the crux of the issue.

> treating “pay me if you get paid for my code” licenses as treated as evil and shameful

Blatantly untrue. Companies riding the coattails of the opensource moniker for PR points while using restrictive licenses is what garners all the hate. It's essentially fraud committed to garner good press.

The other thing that gets people riled up is companies with a CLA that they claim is for responsible stewardship suddenly pulling a fast one and relicensing the project to a non-OSI license. It's perfectly legal but it tends to upset people.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with source available software at any level of restriction. Just be very clear about what it is and isn't.

The license explicitly allows you to make such changes. They could have picked a different license, but didn't.

> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software

> They could have picked a different license, but didn’t.

I disagree.

Licenses that prohibit exploitation of source code for personal reward are treated with hostility, shame, and boycotts — claiming that to restrict in any way the liberty of another person to exploit one’s work is unethical. Human beings are social creatures, and most human beings are not asocial with decoupled ethical systems like myself; so, given the social pressures in play, few human beings truly have the liberty to pick another license and endure the shame and vitriol that exercising that freedom earns from us.

I don't think its fully correct that social pressure means that permissive licenses are no longer meaningful when it comes to the ethics or sociology of open source software.

Since the original subject is also about swapping out the imagery, it's also difficult to take your argument too seriously as the term "exploit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for your argument.

I will also add that the social and ethical component goes both ways: is it ethical to knowingly give something away freely and without restriction and then immediately attempt to impose restrictions through a purely social mechanism? I would say so as long as your expectation is that some might politely decline.

Or worse, some may respond with the same vitriol and then we're at your original point, which doesn't seem to be preventing such an approach here, making me doubt your hypothesis.

> Licenses that prohibit exploitation of source code for personal reward are treated with hostility, shame, and boycotts

I'd have to disagree. However let's just run with it because your subsequent reasoning doesn't seem consistent to me.

If you do A you'll be met with hostility. So instead you do B, but then you add a request "actually please abide by A" and somehow this is supposed to not be met with hostility? You can't have it both ways. B but with an addendum that makes it A is just A wearing a mask. Changing the name doesn't change the thing.

You are presuming this is their primary concern. Releasing software with a permissive license is a pretty strong signal you are ok with people not doing exactly as you ask.

It’s certainly a legal signal, insofar as once you have that signal, you have the ability to make a legally-sound decision on usage — but I don’t presume that it’s in any way an indication of how strongly the author is or isn’t invested in whatever license they chose. Unless accompanied by something written by the maintainer, the only certain statement is that the maintainer released with a metadata attribute set to a value; nothing more.

See also: “Npm should remove the default license from new packages” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43864518

The purpose of a software license is to codify the rights the author grants to its users. The author can't claim to use a free software license, while also making separate demands about how the software can be used. These demands should either be part of the license, or removed altogether. This moral shaming for breaking a "social contract" is ridiculous. The software is either free or not. You can't have it both ways.

“Don’t use this for evil” is a legal and valid software license. This is anathema to programmers and law-as-code adherents, but it’s perfectly acceptable to bring to a court of law in a licensing dispute. Different courts and different acts of accused evil will result in different judgments. It would be very difficult for a corporation to accept that license; it would be very simple for an individual to do so.

Such a license does not comply with your requirements; yet, it is also valid under case law, even if it is statistically unlikely to permit enforcement against most claimed evils. Each society has certain evils that are widely accepted by the courts, so it certainly isn’t a get out of all possible jails free card.

The purpose of a license is to inform of the rights available. The user is responsible for evaluating the license, or for trusting the judgment of a third party if they are uninterested in evaluating themselves.

If the author’s entire license “This is free software for free uses, please contact me for a paid license for paid uses” then that is statistically likely to be court enforceable against exploitation, so long as the terms offered are reasonable to the judge and any expert witnesses called. The Free Software Foundation does not have exclusive rights to the words “free software”. Adoption will be much reduced for someone who writes such a license, of course, and perhaps someone will exploit a loophole that a lengthier outsourced license would have covered. Neither of those outcomes are necessarily worth the time and effort to try and prevent, especially when use of any open source license guarantees the right of exploitation for unshared profit in plain language versus the homegrown one which does not.

(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)

This is not a legal matter, nor is it related to the FSF and any of the "open source" licenses. My argument is philosophical.

Using a license that allows the software to be distributed and modified, while placing restrictions or exemptions to those permissions outside of the license, at the very least sends mixed signals. My point is that if the author wants to make those restrictions, that's fine, but the license is the correct place for it. What's shitty from my moral perspective is using a commonly accepted free software license for marketing purposes, but then judging people for not following some arbitrary demands. If anything, _that_ is the unethical behavior.

I completely agree with you. I just want to point out that the actual software author here is not being aggressive about it. They make a request and that's it. Nor are the other 55 contributors visible on github.

"we ask (but not demand, these are words on the internet, not word of law) that you not remove the Anubis character from your deployment"

For whatever reason somebody decided to blow it out of proportion here on hn.

Well, sure, but the author is also labeling people who don't comply with their request as "cowards" in this very thread. So by the same token that they kindly make a request, they can also refrain from passing judgment on people who kindly don't comply. And the same goes for people who pass their judgment on the author's behalf, or make a point about some "social contract".

Sure, I can agree with that too. Although I think 3rd party outrage is much worse, and borderline infantile.

I’m not sure I’m seeing a lot of outrage here, but I think this is a legitimately interesting discussion.

> Seems pretty unethical to me. Exercising a liberty in direct contradiction to its creator’s wishes for personal gain with no recompense to them is about as crassly selfish and non-prosocial as it gets.

You're ignoring the possibility that users of the software might not agree with the author's wishes. There's nothing unethical about that.

A request to not change a part of the software is the same as a request to not use the software in specific industries, or for a specific purpose. There are many projects that latch on open source for brand recognition, but then "forbid" the software to be used in certain countries, by military agencies, etc. If the author wants to restrict how the software can be used, then it's not libre software.

I disagree. Having the freedom to choose to ignore someone’s wishes does not necessarily make it ethical to exercise that freedom. Ethics are not as simple as “what is not prohibited is therefore ethical”.

Ethics is also not as simple as "the author's wishes are always to be respected". For instance, free software was built on the ethical principle that restrictions on users' four fundamental freedoms (whether that be legal, technical, or in this case social), by IP holders, are unethical. This justifies piracy, and definitely justifies breaking this request.

I don't believe it is possible to reconcile these ethical views, as a ethical subjectivist.

I think there might be cases where the ethical thing to do would be to respect an author's non-binding request. However the request in this case seems directly contradictory to the principles of open source software and thus I can't bring myself to see it as legitimate.

Edit to add, an example of a non-contradictory request might be to contribute monetarily in proportion to the financial benefit you derive. It's an additional non-binding request to help sustain the community which seems reasonably consistent with the ethos of opensource to me.

The issue is that opensource is a movement that comes with a set of values attached. The licenses aren't impersonal the way the copyright system at large is.

Removing some stupid cartoon character is hardly a huge ethical violation, despite their wishes.

Sure, you can say it’s unethical in that it directly contravenes their request - I won’t argue that - but it’s the smallest of violations.

As far as I can see it’s MIT licensed so you have no legal obligation otherwise. If they truly cared about people keeping the character, they should have made the request with teeth.

I don’t even understand why they made the request in the first place. The nature of the request makes it seem as though it isn’t actually important at all, so why make the request at all? It just puts everyone else in an uncomfortable position. If keeping the character is important, then why release it under MIT license?

> Seems pretty unethical to me.

I'm seeing this sentiment multiple times on this thread - "fine, it's legal, but it's still wrong!"

That's an extremely disrespectful take on someone adhering to a contract that both parties agreed to. You are using shaming language to pressure people into following your own belief system.

In this specific instance, the author could have chosen any damn license they wanted to. They didn't. They chose one to get the most adoption.

You appear to want both:

1. Widespread adoption

and

2. Restrict what others can do.

The MIT license is not compatible with #2 above. You can ask nicely, but if you don't get what you want you don't get to jump on a fucking high horse and religiously judge others using your own belief system.

Author should have used GPL (so any replaced images get upstreamed back and thus he has control) OR some other proprietary license that prevents modifications like changing the image.

A bunch of finger-pointers gabbing on forums about those "evil" people who stick to both the word and the spirit of the license are nothing more than the modern day equivalent of witch-hunters using "intent" to secure a prosecution.

Be better than that - don't join the mob in pointing out witches. We don't need more puritans.

The LGPL/GPL/AGPL family of licenses don't require upstreaming, only passing source code downstream to end users.

In this case upstreaming replaced images wouldn't be useful to the author anyway, they are going to keep the anime image.

> In this case upstreaming replaced images wouldn't be useful to the author anyway, they are going to keep the anime image.

In this case, it would be, because (presumably) the new images are the property of the user, and they would hardly want (for example) their company logo to be accidentally GPL'ed.

I do not agree with your position that two parties who enter into a contract are no longer subject to ethical judgment by others. Contract law does not invalidate ethics, no matter how appealing it is to opt out of them. As one of the asocial / decoupled people who has no social compulsion whatsoever, I voluntarily opt-in to preferring prosocial outcomes and typically deem anti-prosocial actions unethical even if our society currently accepts them.

For example, if an employee does something hostile towards society at their employer when they have the freedom to choose not to do so — and since employment is at will, they always have that freedom to choose — I will tend to judge their antisocial actions unethical, even if their contract allows it. (This doesn’t mean I will therefore judge the person as unethical! One instance does not a pattern make, etc.)

So, for me, ethical judgments are not opt-out under any circumstance, nor can they be abrogated by contract or employment or law. I hold this is a non-negotiable position, so I will withdraw here; you’re welcome to continue persuading others if you wish.

> Contract law does not invalidate ethics, no matter how appealing it is to opt out of ethics

I didn't claim it does, I am claiming that since ethics is subjective and the contract is not, you subjecting your moral standard to others is no different than a mob subjecting an old woman to accusations of being a witch.

Now, you may not have a problem publicly judging others, but your actions are barely different from those of the Westboro Baptist Church.

IOW, sure, you are allowed to publicly condemn people who hold different moral beliefs to you, but the optics are not good for you.

You seem to be making the argument that someone who uses shaming language to impose their ideological/religious is should not be responded to in kind.

I obviously disagree; smearing a veneer of civility over thought-policing does not make that thought policing any more acceptable.

> You're literally condeming them for having different moral beliefs than you right now,

You also appear to be claiming that, when being policed by puritans, one should politely put up with it. I also disagree - I don't think puritanical holier-than-thou comments deserve more civility than they give.

> I wonder how you feel the optics of this reflects on you, because I don't think it's good for you.

People pointing out thought-policing always look good ;-)

The ones who are crusading for it tend to look bad. I'm not too worried.