The Anti-Capitalist Software License

… or “How to make your software unusable with questionable legalese”.<p>Not a lawyer, but I can easily imagine how “An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and does not exploit the labor of non-members” could be interpreted in dozens of different ways, making the use of any such licensed software a very dicey proposition.

&gt; all workers are owners with equal share.<p>How common is this in worker co-operatives? My guess is &quot;doesn&#x27;t exist anywhere&quot; -- I&#x27;m guessing there&#x27;s always some correlation between seniority and ownership share, even if it&#x27;s just &quot;you have to pass a short probationary period before you&#x27;re an owner&quot;.<p>It sounds like they haven&#x27;t really thought this through. Besides seniority -- does someone who&#x27;s worked there for twenty years really deserve the same share of ownership that someone who started last week does? -- there&#x27;s also hours to consider: does someone who works ten or twenty hours a week deserve the same share as someone who works forty hours a week? I think most would agree that doesn&#x27;t really make sense, but the current wording of the license mandates it.

&gt; An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and does not exploit the labor of non-members<p>Sounds basically impossible to me. How do you ensure that you don’t exploit the labor of non-members? If you buy as much as even an office chair, or a pencil sharpener, or a carpet, or whatever, there were probably very many people involved and some of them were being exploited in that they were paid a very low amount for their work.

This is only worth reading if you take it as a commentary&#x2F;artwork. If you read it as a real licence it all feels a little bit childish.

Part of the genius of the work of RMS- his behavioral issues aside- is the creation out of whole cloth of a legal protocol that is sufficiently precisely defined, sufficiently operationalizable, and sufficiently defensible as to...actually work, to have behavioral impacts in the real world. It is hard to appreciate how incredible an achievement that is.<p>This license is not that, for all sorts of obvious reasons, which is a shame. Articulating a set of use principles in the extremely broad area the authors have an interest in is not impossible. Not only not impossible, but desirable. Software is leverage, and working to ensure leverage can only be used by the weaker party in any specific context is part of an equity protocol. If such a thing is going to exist, someone has to do the work to define it. One hopes they take a step back and give it another go.

Worth contrasting with other &#x27;Ethos licenses&#x27;. There&#x27;s a really good writeup of &#x27;common&#x27; ones here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coss.media&#x2F;advent-of-ethos-licensing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coss.media&#x2F;advent-of-ethos-licensing&#x2F;</a><p>The most famous is the JSON Good-Not-Evil one.<p>I particularly like the term &#x27;crayon license&#x27; for licenses drawn up by people without experience in writing licenses.

I kinda like the idea.<p>I severely doubt the practically and usability of this.<p>I would be interested to see an expert lawyers take on how to write this license, so that it could actually work and hold up in court.

What about those companies who argue that they don’t <i>seek</i> profit, but that they profit anyways.<p>Also: would this then include Amazon pre-2001?

The GPL is not anti-capitalist but it will in some ways stop businesses profiting of your work withing giving back.<p>I believe all software should be either some variant of the GPL or GPL&#x2F;Commercial dual. The latter is so a company can choose not to comply with the GPL but still give back to the project (financially).<p>Anti-capitalism is a strange ideology given recent history. Most flaws pointed at capitalism today actually stem from problems that most capitalists would take issue with (corruption, overregulation, underregulation etc.). The people who built the Soviet Union and other socialist countries weren&#x27;t stupid, the task is just impossible.

How would this be applied in the case where the user was a wholly-or-partially state-funded organization (that was neither military nor law enforcement)?<p>[clearly hasn&#x27;t been lawyer-vetted, but any wild guesses?]

It doesn’t make sense, feels like a teenager approach to the world.

Probably doesn&#x27;t work for many cooperatives that are often a mix of owners and employees.

As I read it, an individual is allowed to use this software to seek a profit, so it isn&#x27;t anti-capitalist at all, at best it&#x27;s anti-corporatist.<p>IANAL but I&#x27;m just guessing no court would take this seriously.

The licence prohibits Law Enforcement use. What does that have to do with Capitalism? I&#x27;m fairly sure every socialist&#x2F;communist&#x2F;facist country has some form of law enforcement.

Also give the authors background, that&#x27;s more an artistic take - than a real, well thought, license.<p>For a &quot;real&quot;, pro-freedom AND anti-capitalist software license, please consider GPL 3.<p>And for a &quot;real&quot;, pro-freedom AND capitalism-agnostic software license, consider MIT.