[Zero]

I've got this weird idea... thought I would share.

There are all kinds of open source licenses, MIT, GPL2/3, LGPL, there's even a What-The-F*** license (even though this one wasn't written by law experts obviously, so it is not really a serious one, but I think it was the whole point of it).

I'm wondering what you can do with licenses. We already know that you can forbid or authorize commercial usage, sub-licensing, and a few other things like require proper attribution, ...etc. For example, would it be possible to require users to include a link to a specific charity or an NGO, or even to make a donation.

The idea would be to code for good: anybody using your wonderful framework or library would have a legal obligation to promote the chosen charitable organization. For this to work, the text of the license would have to be written by lawyers or something.

Take this one for instance. I'm pretty sure they could use some help.

What do you think, dumb idea?

[ivan.moony]

I think it could work if it would be limited resource obligation like one-time donation or something. Look what Facebook built -  on your birthday, you can raise money for some charity organization. The option is still wired within Facebook a few years now, so I believe the thing generally works.

[WriterOfMinds]

I think it's a good idea, and things like it have been done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careware

You couldn't expect perfect enforcement. Some people would violate the license. But that happens with existing licenses anyway (e.g. I am sure some people use CC-attribution licensed items without attributing).

[Zero]

Ah, having a word for it helps a lot! So, this is Careware licensing. It sounds less geeky than Superman licensing

Enforcement is not really of primary importance in my opinion, because using a product that's Superman licensed is also a choice. There are always so many open source alternatives.

It can be part of a CSR.

[Zero]

Just in case, I double-posted it at Dream.In.Code here : https://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/421206-the-superman-license/

Someone went up with some good feedback, and the idea has evolved:

If you simultaneously use several frameworks or libraries that are Superman licensed, you have an obligation to promote only one of the charities/NGOs among all of the ones chosen by these frameworks/libraries.

[infurl]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.11757

AI for good (AI4G) projects involve developing and applying artificial intelligence (AI) based solutions to further goals in areas such as sustainability, health, humanitarian aid, and social justice. Developing and deploying such solutions must be done in collaboration with partners who are experts in the domain in question and who already have experience in making progress towards such goals. Based on our experiences, we detail the different aspects of this type of collaboration broken down into four high-level categories: communication, data, modeling, and impact, and distill eleven takeaways to guide such projects in the future. We briefly describe two case studies to illustrate how some of these takeaways were applied in practice during our past collaborations.