







ethics, open source, and free riding
Addressing open source's free rider problem
Free riders take more than they give, and they can stress an open system. Here's how we can begin to address the issue.

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.
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.

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 …

It’s time to rethink Open Source
Why developers give away valuable work for free — and what can be done to take that money back.

Introducing the Permissive License Stack
We believe open-source values are critical to free societies, especially in the digital age. To that end, we’ve created a new approach to licensing invoking the principles of the Default Open Pledge

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.

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.
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.

Katerina Marchán (@zkat@toot.cat)
Open source maintainers of major projects (hi) are not ready to accept and talk about how the cultural insistence on permissive licensing is just straight up labor exploitation taking advantage of our addiction to popularity (also hi). We’re doing this to ourselves too, you know.


Why open source: 25 reasons to embrace it | Ben Balter
Open source isn't a fad. Here are twenty-five economic, moral, and personal reasons your organization should embrace it.
