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Ethical source

Programming På svenska → Updated: 2026-11-01

Licences that forbid certain uses of the code on moral grounds – and which are, by definition, not open source.

The movement got its name and momentum in 2019, when Coraline Ada Ehmke published the Hippocratic License, which bans uses that violate human rights. Its ancestor was the 2002 JSON licence, in which Douglas Crockford added that the software "shall be used for Good, not Evil". IBM asked for, and received, an exception allowing IBM and its customers to use it for evil.

The Open Source Initiative rejects all such licences: the Open Source Definition forbids discrimination against persons or fields of endeavour. The objections are practical too. Who decides what counts as evil, and which corporate lawyer signs off on a dependency with that clause? The result is code that's off-limits to exactly the careful users who actually read licences.

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