Yes. We worked with a team of talented and specialized IP lawyers to create versions 2.0 and later of the license.
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The “Open Source Definition” states that an open source license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons, or against any field of endeavor, respectively.
No “Groups” or “Fields” are discriminated against by the Hippocratic License. People in the Groups are welcome to use software under the Hippocratic License in their Fields. The restrictions in the Hippocratic License target specific activities, and do not discriminate against groups of people or fields of endeavor. The restrictions apply equally to all people and all groups, in all fields of endeavor.
However, within a strict “traditionalist” interpretation, the Hippocratic License’s ethical constraints may be considered a “willful violation” of Clauses 5 and 6.
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Edmund Berkeley, an early computer pioneer and founder of the Association for Computing Machines, said that there are some activities which are undeniably for social good, some activities which are undeniably against social good, acknowledging that there is a wide swath of activities that cannot clearly be classified.
The ethical foundation of the Hippocratic License is derived from international standards including the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone human rights document proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, and intended as a common standard for all peoples and all nations. The UDHR is a set of ethical standards defining universal human rights that do not vary from person to person or place to place.
When a state is engaged in human rights violations, there is little chance of a legal remedy of any kind being an effective deterrent, and a license of any kind (including permissive open source licenses) is likely to be unenforceable.
The Hippocratic License was designed to cause friction when another party (such as a corporation) uses software to aid in those human rights abuses.
An example of this scenario in the real world is the software consultancy Palantir using open source in providing services to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) in the US, responsible for human rights violations at the border. Even then, the license can’t outright prevent the abuses— it can only create friction and make material support more expensive for the contractor, while also empowering the developer of the licensed software to prevent their work to be used for unethical purposes.
In a way, this is similar to digital security precautions. We have a variety of tools and techniques that are combined and layered in such a way as to create as many hurdles or obstacles to would-be attackers as possible, without ever being able to guarantee 100% security.
You can view a list of featured adopters here.
The Hippocratic License uses semantic versioning, and URLs for all versions are permanent:
Yes, and you can find its entry at https://spdx.org/licenses/Hippocratic-3.0.html.
Use “Hippocratic 3.0” plus the module indicators (e.g. “Hippocratic 3.0 (HL3-ECO)") for a license configured to include the Ecocide module). Our license builder will provide you with the specific annotation based on your module selections.