Why programs must not limit the freedom to run them

by Richard Stallman

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...

[...] Some developers propose to place usage restrictions in software licenses to ban using the program for certain purposes, but that would be a disastrous path. [...]

A license condition against fraud would be superfluous in a country where fraud is a crime. But why not a condition against using it for torture, a practice that states frequently condone when carried out by the “security forces”?

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A condition against torture would not work, because enforcement of any free software license is done through the state. A state that wants to carry out torture will ignore the license. When victims of US torture try suing the US government, courts dismiss the cases on the grounds that their treatment is a national security secret. If a software developer tried to sue the US government for using a program for torture against the conditions of its license, that suit would be dismissed too. In general, states are clever at making legal excuses for whatever terrible things they want to do. Businesses with powerful lobbies can do it too.

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What if the condition were against some specialized private activity? For instance, PETA proposed a license that would forbid use of the software to cause pain to animals with a spinal column. Or there might be a condition against using a certain program to make or publish drawings of Mohammad. Or against its use in experiments with embryonic stem cells. Or against using it to make unauthorized copies of musical recordings.

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It is not clear these would be enforcible. Free software licenses are based on copyright law, and trying to impose usage conditions that way is stretching what copyright law permits, stretching it in a dangerous way. Would you like books to carry license conditions about how you can use the information in them?

What if such conditions are legally enforcible—would that be good?

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The fact is, people have very different ethical ideas about the activities that might be done using software. [...] If we accepted programs with usage restrictions as part of a free operating system such as GNU, people would come up with lots of different usage restrictions. There would be programs banned for use in meat processing, programs banned only for pigs, programs banned only for cows, and programs limited to kosher foods. Someone who hates spinach might write a program allowing use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan might allow use only for spinach. There would be music programs allowed only for rap music, and others allowed only for classical music.

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The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task.

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The conclusion is clear: a program must not restrict what jobs its users do with it. Freedom 0 must be complete. We need to stop torture, but we can't do it through software licenses. The proper job of software licenses is to establish and protect users' freedom.