The topic of blanket bans by companies like GitHub and GitLab has become a focus of debate over the last month as Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led to some developers taking action. We wrote about the Scarf open source gateway limiting access to open source packages for the Russian government and military entities.
As we noted at the time, there was a primary distinction made when Scarf took this action: distribution of open source software is separate from the licensing of it. Those points of the OSI definition pertain to the licensing, not to some entity actively providing the software to others.An essay by Bradley M. Kuhn, a policy fellow and hacker-in-residence at the Software Freedom Conservancy, argues that copy left won't solve all problems, just some of them.
The idea that open source software can affect change by way of licensing limitations is not supported by the essay. He spent nearly 3000 words on the topic, before addressing the issue of Russia with a similar conclusion to the one reached by Scarf earlier this month. FOSS licenses are not an effective tool to advance social justice causes other than software freedom, and developers have a moral obligation to take stances by way of other methods.
"For example, FOSS developers should refuse to work specifically on bug reports from companies who don't pay their workers a living wage," Kuhn offers in an example. Regarding Russia specifically, Kuhn again points to distribution as an avenue of protest, while still remaining in line with the principles of free and open source software.Software freedom guarantees the right to refuse to distribute new versions of the software, and every FOSS license in existence permits this. It is recommended that FOSS projects do not give Putin easy access to updates.
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