Eric S. Raymond ("ESR", co-founder of the Open Source Initiative) was banned from the OSI mailing list

It's all started in the OSI license-discuss mailing list:

http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-February/021237.html

Eric Schultz (https://twitter.com/wwahammy) suggested that we should add some kind of "We don't like Them" clause to the Open Source licenses ("Persona non Grata Preamble", "PNG"). As an example, Amazon was listed (for cooperation with the US immigration police) and British Petroleum (for environmental pollution), just like that:

The PROJECT_NAME community values human rights and discourages human rights violators from using our software and, at our sole discretion, excludes such violators and their employees from our community. At writing, we exclude the following organizations:

Amazon - for collaboration with ICE
BP - assisting in climate destruction

These organizations and their employees are not welcome to participate in PROJECT_NAME community. We intend to reject any issue submissions, pull requests and support requests from these organizations and their employees and ban their participation in any project forums and conferences.

Wipe your eyes and read again: it's basically could be treated like "If you are an ORGANISATION_NAME employee, we may not accept bugs and/or pull requests from you, also we may ban you wherever we have rights, without any further explanations, period".

Some messages from the discussion

Richard Fontana (lawyer at RedHat, one of the GPLv3 authors) to Eric Schultz:

So, suppose a PNG preamble says "Members of $marginalized_group are not welcome in our community" (I think from your initial message you recognize that your approach could be used in such a way). If I could demonstrate that an effect of that language was that members of $marginalized_group avoided the software altogether, isn't that almost as bad as an outright prohibition on use by those members?

Eric Schultz replied:

It'd be vile and as a community I'd hope we'd organize to discourage that kind of behavior. I don't know that I'd consider it non-FOSS. And yes, I think one of the biggest risks of using this mechanism is publicizing it so others use it to target marginalized people. That's why I'm not recommending it or devising a license.

ESR (joins mailing list):

After twenty years of staying off this list, I have joined it. I didn't, until now, because whenever I checked in on this list the regulars seemed to be doing the job I expected them to do quite competently. And I had enough of an "I can't be everywhere, dammit!" problem without adding to it. But there are two recent developments I find concerning that have convinced me I need to weigh in. Please pay careful attention, as I am not making this choice likely [meant: lightly] . I will start individual threads for both issues

ESR:

What is certain is that "social justice", even if one views the term in a positive light, is *not OSI's job.* Our responsibility is to protect a narrow and particular set of liberties, not to fix society.

Eric Schultz:

We need a set of options, licensing or otherwise, that uphold the OSD and FSD and allow them to make some different on the other issues in the world. I'm trying to explore the licensing topic here.

ESR:

No, we don't.
I am not fooled. You are mounting an ideological attack on our core principles of liberty and nondiscrimination. You will not succeed while I retain any ability to oppose this.

ESR:

I reject the "Persona Non Grata" clause, and all other attempts at so-called "ethical" open-source licensing, in the strongest possible terms. To get entangled in this sort of thing would not merely be against OSI's charter as expressed in the OSD, it would invite second- and third-order effects that would be gravely harmful.

This is really what I joined the list to say. The fairness-vs.-mission issue I discussed in my previous post, though serious, probably wouldn't have been enough to motivate me in itself.

I initiated the founding of OSI so it could pursue and defend freedom. Thomas Paine had an apposite quote: "He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

Whatever hypothetical good might be done in individual cases by denying the use of open-source code to putatively evil persons and organizations would be swamped by the systemic harm from enabling people to use open-source licenses in political vendettas. Because such precedent, as Paine understood, always comes back to bite you; there would be no end to the feuds, the divisiveness, and the erosion of freedom if we went down that path.

Clauses 5 and 6 are in the OSD in part for that reason, and approving mechanisms to end-run them - such as the Persona Non Grata clause - would be a direct and egregious violation of OSI's charter and my intentions in founding OSI. Such clauses are not even a fit topic for *discussion* here outside of a swift recognition that they are out of bounds.

With whatever moral authority I still have here, I say to all advocates of soi-disant "ethical" licensing not just "No" but "To hell with you *and* the horse you rode in on."

PNG clause is explicitly OSD-controversial

This may not be discussed at all, the discussion should be closed right there https://opensource.org/osd:

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.

At some point the real source of this initiative appeared: Ethical Source Definition ("ESD")

Gil Yehuda:

We operate in the realm of words, and words matter, words help clarify.

Analogy: Food labels can indicate a product to be Organic, Free Trade, Gluten-free, Kosher, Poisonous, etc. Each of these labels indicate something different. No one insists that in order to be considered Free Trade that a product must also be Organic. That erodes meaning and confuses the marketplace. A product might be traded fairly and not get the certification. A product might be gluten-free and poisonous. Don't consume that product, even if you are gluten intolerant. It's not good for you.

Licenses that have been approved by the OSI as having complied with OSD are Open Source. We all get that. Separately from OSI a group of people created a separate concept called Ethical Source and they created a separate definition https://ethicalsource.dev/definition/ which is also separate from the OSD. Thankfully they make it very clear that no one should confuse the ESD with the OSD. They obviously mean different things.

Personally I'm confused about the details of the ESD, but that's OK, if I wanted to, I'd join the working group and learn more about it. I would not conflate that work with OSI. In fact, reading the ESD I see it to conflict with OSI much the way you could not have organic grass-fed pork that was also kosher.

My recommendation: if ESD is interesting to you, work on it. If OSD is interesting, work on it. If someone can create a license that complies with both, more power to you. But unless one of those definitions changes, I don't think that's going to happen. IMO these should be treated as separate endeavors with separate goals.

(yep, that's https://ethicalsource.dev by Coraline Ada Ehmke)

What happened next is not entirely clear because the messages seem to be deleted from the archives, but apparently he was banned for this:

ESR:

Here is everything you need to know about the ESD [Ethical Source Definition]:

* Its originator is a toxic loonytoon who believes "show me the code" meritocracy is at best outmoded and in general a sinister supremacist plot by straight white cisgender males.

* The actual goal of the movement behind the ESD is to install political officers on every open-source project, passing on what constitutes "ethical" and banishing contributors for wrongthink. Even off-project wrongthink.

* They have already had an alarming degree of success at this through the institution of "Codes of Conduct" on many projects. This *has* led to the expulsion of productive contributors for un-PCness; it's not just a problem in theory.

* The "Persona Non Grata" clause is best understood as an attempt to paralyze resistance to such political ratfucking by subverting the freedom-centered principles of OSI. It is very unlikely to be the last such attempt.

Make no mistake; we are under attack. If we do not recognize the nature of the attack and reject it, we risk watching the best features of the open-source subculture be smothered by identity politics and vulgar Marxism.

ESR wrote The right to be rude (kind of post-mortem).

Bottom notes

I had to post this using a throw-away account, sorry about that.

I share ESR's point of view and find the "Persona non grata" initiative discriminatory and unacceptable for Free Software.

I don't have anything personal against people like Coraline Ada Ehmke or Eric Schultz but I think they're doing more harm than good to the community.

I'm afraid public expression of this point of view may cause similar consequences to me like de-platforming or even problems with my employer.

It's a shame that in 2020 we can't freely express our opinions and the voice of one loud activist may drown out a dozen silent guys who just write their code.

I'd like to quote How To Ask Questions The Smart Way here:

Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to give offense. Rather, it's the product of the direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy.

Thank you for reading to this point.