At our P2P Foundation wiki we have given some space to developments around equity-based licenses, such as the IANG License, which attempt to incorporate an additional layer of ethical values, centered around equity, in the peer property-based licensing arrangements that protect the common peer production.

However, Stephen Merten of Oekonux is of the opinion that such efforts may be counterproductive, and his arguments are certainly worth reflection. The citations are from the Oekonux mailing list.

Stefan Merten:

“Oekonux comes more from a perspective on productive forces and their mechanics. This is not about ethics. Two points.

I think Free Software gained momentum **only** because it is non-discriminatory as far as use of the software is concerned. Would the licenses discriminate against certain uses you would run into a couple of problems immediately:

* Where to draw the line?

On ethical grounds it is very hard to draw the line about good and bad. Because the form of rights Free Software gives you is expressed by a license you need to encode good and bad in the license. This is difficult to achieve in the first place and it is very difficult to maintain in practice.

In effect you would have a license where only very few persons can be sure that they have the rights the license promises. As a Free Software user you’ll never know whether the copyright holder will sue you because on ethical ground s/he thinks you have no right to use the Free Software.

* Different opinions would scare away good developers

If you had such ethical licenses there are certainly bright developers who would not share the ethical standards encoded in a certain license. In effect they would not join a Free Software project – or create another one with a less restrictive license.

This would be probably lead to separated worlds with less restrictive and more restrictive licenses making combination of Free Software a nightmare. Again this would severely damage the general utility of Free Software.

And BTW: If you check which ideological fights including forks Free Software developers already have about *existing* non-ethical licenses I’d not like to imagine what would happen with ethical licenses…

Leftist people usually have a hard time to accept that the Free Software movement is heterogeneous as far as ethics are concerned. Indeed there are important people which IMHO have very questionable political opinions.

However, if you look at the development of productive forces this does not matter at all. A new form of production gains power whether it is ethical in terms of the ancient system or not. This was similar with capitalism BTW which indeed gained a lot from the wars of the feudals.

On the contrary to me it is a very good sign that the germ form is *not* rooted in ethical / political grounds. To me political forms
have proven to not be able to overcome capitalism. And this is logical if you accept that the *real* power of capitalism comes from the way of production – and *this* power is undermined by Free Software.

I’d agree that as a result this not automatically means that a GPL society based on the principles of the development of Free Software means a better place in terms of a mind coined by a capitalist environment. However, as far as I can see a GPL society will remove crucial problems of capitalism – namely the importance of alienated relationships.

In Oekonux we say that Free Software – and other Free Projects – are stronger in terms of productivity / quality than the capitalist way of production. That is Free Projects attack the very stronghold of capitalism. Though Free Software as we know it would probably not be possible without the Internet technology and certainly not without digital copy this would not be important if there would be no different mode of production.”