







bringing openness to software of moral concern
Contributor Covenant | Contributor Covenant 3
The most widely adopted code of conduct in open source. Stewarded by the Organization for Ethical Source.

Invasion of The Ethical Licenses
About 23 years ago, I created the Debian Free Software Guidelines to help the Debian developers decide what software was permissible to include in Debian, which aspired to be 100% Free Software, and what should be consigned to a "non-free" repository upon which Debian would never depend. Nine months later, those guidelines became the Open Source Definition, and I announced Open Source to the world.
Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …

Is Your Open Source Code Leading to Human Rights Violations? | Built In
The Ethical Source movement is questioning the central assumptions of open source culture.

Keep Your Friends Close — Open Tech Strategies | Blog
One of the insider secrets of free and open source software (FOSS) is that most of the rules a project uses on a day-to-day basis are not found in the software’s license. There are contribution guidelines, which are enforced by the project only taking contributions that meet them. There are codes of conduct, which are a condition of community participation. There are endorsements, official membership, a voice in setting the project roadmap, and all kinds of other benefits that attach to varying types of community participation. In each case, entirely external to the license, there are official rules and unwritten norms that govern how participants gain the benefits of joining the civic life of a project.
Unboxing the Toolkit - Toolshed
Perhaps our toolkits can offer new ethical and pedagogical frames, reshaping the contexts for tool use – and informing the worlds we build with them.


What We Believe
The Organization for Ethical Source is a global, multidisciplinary community devoted to centering justice, equity, and human rights in the practice of open source.

Ethical Source: Open Source, Evolved.
The Organization for Ethical Source is a global, multidisciplinary community devoted to centering justice, equity, and human rights in the practice of open source.

Ethical Source: Open Source, Evolved.
The Organization for Ethical Source is a global, multidisciplinary community devoted to centering justice, equity, and human rights in the practice of open source.

Coraline Ada Ehmke: The Rising Ethical Storm in Open Source
In the twenty years since the term “open source” was coined by Christine Peterson, our community has grown astronomically, all the while learning from its successes and failures. A lot has changed for open source developers in the past two decades. But the political and technological landscape has also changed.
The Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse
With Discourse, it was clear that we needed to totally reboot the software to create next-generation forum software. But code is only part of the story. Any reasonable attempt at delivering a Civilized Discourse Construction Kit has to provide a safe, simple default set of guidelines for civilized discourse.

LibreCorps mentors humanitarian startups on how to run the open source way
Free and open source software are no longer workplace taboos, at least not in the same way they were fifteen years ago.
