[wilhelmtux-discussion] A new political licence?

[Theo Schmidt]

Doubtless most of you here will be just as saddened as I am about the 
attack against Irak, and angry and frustrated about the way the US 
and UK governments, with a little help from some of their vasalls, 
are trampling on the International Law of Nations, and preverting the 
meaning of "Democracy", "Freedom", "Christianity", and "Peace", etc.

No, I'm not going to launch a tirade against Microsoft, who supported 
Bush with 480 million dollars ( http://boycottbush.net ) and is 
therefore most probably co-responsible that Bush is in power at all, 
but going to suggest a new type of licence.

I have written only one piece of software in my life, a useful 
program for simulating propellers. I have always given it away free 
to members of some societies I am in and indeed to anybody who asked, 
including the source code. Recently I was thinking about "officially" 
putting it under GNU-GPL.

Now that that this war has started, I feel there is a need for a new 
type of licence a bit more restrictive than GNU-GPL. I would call it 
a "Freedom-Licence" or a "Peace-Licence". It would require the user 
of the software to abide by the International Law of Nations as 
defined by the UN-Charter, or even declare support for this. I would 
like to write such a licence for my own program as a variant of the 
GNU-GPL. This would prevent for example the Israeli army, which 
claims to use some form of Linux, from legally using my program, or 
indeed anybody supporting the present illegal war.

The purpose of this mail is to ask you here if you think this is 
worthwhile persuing or not. I would be especially interested in the 
opinion of Richard Stallman, as you offered to comment some of the 
things here.

- is it totally naiv? (A user who breaks the International Law
   of Nations won't care about licences anyway)

- is is counterproductive? (Is it good for GNU-Linux that the
   Israeli army is using it, or not? Or, closer to home, would
   we want the Swiss arms factory RUAG, which is illegally and/or
   immorally exporting arms to the USA to start using GNU-GPL
   programs or not?)

- is it ridiculous? (like "Freedom-Fries"?)

- is the idea of greatest possible freedom higher then ethical
   values or not? (statt: Fressen vor Moral, Freiheit vor Moral?)

- do too many different licences dilute GNU-GPL too much?

If no to all these, how can we derive this new variant of "ethical" 
licence from the GNU-GPL? Is it sufficent to simply add a sentence 
defining the restriction? What would be a good name for such a 
licence?

Theo Schmidt, Steffisburg