PETA Creates New Animal-Friendly Software License 356
Anders writes "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the largest animal rights organization in the world, endorse a new FLOSS license. From the article: 'The Harm-Less Permissive License (HPL) is a permissive, non copyleft, software license. It is based on the FreeBSD license but with one additional restriction; the "harm-less" clause. It prevents software, licensed under the HPL, to be used for harming humans or animals.'" I guess this leaves the bunny-fueled power plant in Stockholm out in the cold.
I like PETA but.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think PETA should be wading into the waters of making a new license - the mess they make in doing so is not worth the negligible benefit for the cause of animal welfare they're trying to serve.
If we had a time machine and could hop back in time to make initial versions of the GPL involve a broader cultural conscience, *maybe* this kind of thing would be appropriate, but it's too late now and adding another license that's likely to be incompatible with the GPL means that this is the license equivalent of "straight to videocasette".
Define 'Harm' (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm reminded of Asimov's 0th law of robotics, "A robot may not harm humanity or through inaction allow humanity to come to harm". Hunting deer, for instance, certainly harms the deer that are killed but in many areas the natural predators have been all but wiped out and not hunting would lead to massive overpopulation. Eventually causing much more harm to both the animals not being hunted and to the ecosystem in general.
So, what is 'harm'? Is a nuclear power plant harmful to humans or animals? Is a prison harmful to humans or helpful? How about a nuclear power plant? How about a video game that depicts the harming of humans or animals?
Makes sense in one way... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're going to use the rights granted under the license, you then must grant those same rights to others. Unfortunately, this license does not grant the right to be free from harm - so it doesn't make sense to address causing or not causing harm as a responsibility.
Still, it's a contract, and you can say pretty much whatever you want in a contract - the real goal would seem to be to make it expensive for people to disagree with PETA's stances (whatever they happen to be at the moment), which tends to be the real goal of most contracts.
Ryan Fenton
Re:FLOSS software? (Score:5, Interesting)
PETA is anti-free all on their own. By definition, they want to people to either voluntarily, or by restriction of law, to behave in their version of "Ethical" or face serious consequences. Most reasonable people oppose animal cruelty and torture. But PETA's definition and most everyone else's are far different things, as in No pets, No work animals, Veganism for all.
It is a silly, shabby, and soon to be ineffective ploy for attention whoring.
They are very much like Scientology, (Score:4, Interesting)
more a kooky religion than anything else. In the mid 2000's I ended up being closely associated for career reasons with several people inside PETA, a couple of coordinators and some field workers, and had a chance to lunch with them a few times.
Their "ethical" position as we talked was that all pets must die and pet ownership ended, because it is inherently a form of suffering to lead the "unnatural" life of a pet. Furthermore, they carried this largely to humans; they made snide comments about people around us with children and often linked having children to the creation of suffering, since to live is to suffer (and therefore to create a human is to cause them suffering). They agreed that they could never take part in such an unethical thing.
Anytime you get into "all of humanity ought to die out because all humans do is suffer; oh, how glorious a world without humans and thus human suffering would finally be," you're deeply into cult territory, which matches up well with PETA's tendency to impose pressure on employees to end contact with intentionally non-vegan/non-vegetarian friends and family members.
For once, I'm impressed by PETA (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone obviously did their homework here W.R.T. software licenses. My guess is that the name mentioned at the bottom of the license page [peta.org] (Anders '4ZM' Sundman) is someone who works with FLOSS licenses often, and (like many of us on /.) can easily rattle these concerns off pretty easily.
Still, I'm impressed that PETA would allow that kind of critical analysis on the license page. Usually advocacy groups concentrate on the advantages of their position, and avoid active pro/con debate, at least on official pages.
I'm also intrigued that PETA put up a 2nd license on the page -- the so-called wHPL license. The basic difference between the HPL and the wHPL is that the former is written to protect Humans + Animals, and the latter is just written to protect Humans. While PETA offering users a choice between the two is admirable, I am curious as to why they would author the 2nd license at all.
Don't get me wrong, protecting humans is a great and noble cause, but if PETA believes that the furry (and not-so-furry) critters deserve equal protection as humans, then why would they provide a license that allows users to protect humans while, at the same time, roasting up Bambi et al. for some shish-kabobs?
I see two possible motivations here
I may not agree with PETA on many things, but it's certainly nice to see such frank self-analysis accompanying a software license. Kudos to them.