From open source to ethical source

What social responsibility do you have as a software developer?

The rise of the ethical license

I was inspired by Vargo’s predicament (which you can read about in part two of this series), and the growing sense that the open source establishment was not interested in empowering developers like him to fulfill their societal responsibilities. So on September 22, 2019, I released the 1.0 version of the Hippocratic License, described as an Ethical Open Source license.

The reaction by open source purists was immediate and forceful. Bruce Perens, author of the Open Source Definition, wrote that it was impossible to define (let alone encapsulate in a license) a universal set of ethics.

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