Ethics in Open Source: Responsibilities and Sustainability
Many of my articles in the Student Paper have often been prefixed or postfixed with a plea to not be taken as an expert. On the matter of ethics again, I profess no formal training. However, this in itself drives the ramblings and musings herein. Having trained as a chemical engineer with several industrial hazards and sustainability courses, it might seem incongruous that the question of ethical responsibilities fails to make an appearance. As an engineer, one’s job is seen as a means to an end, whatever said end may be, and often encompasses grey areas involving strict adherence to the legal minimum responsibilities; waste and hazards treatment are always couched in terms of minimal compliance, as are building and plant safety guidelines. Part of this is pragmatic, the engineering corps serve as the backbone of the industry, by construction these bastions of industrialization, from mustard gas to fracking, are scarcely meant to promote goodwill and happiness for all.
Changing perspectives on ethical engineering
The harsh realities of economies of scale demand often rapacious local harvests to spur growth. It needn’t be this way though. From my perspective as publications chair [1] of the American Institute of Chemical Engineering’s Young Professionals Committee (AIChE-YPC), ethics feature prominently in the minds of young engineers. People want to be better. This is also codified in the wider industrial community as noted in the British Royal Society of Engineering’s recent report on Engineering Ethics [2]. On the ethics of scientific research, much of the wider community tends to err on the side of the nuclear weapons team at Los Alamos, where they assumed no responsibility for the end-uses of their scientific and technical achievements. Often those who discuss ethics within the scientific community are too far removed from where they are needed or work in an echo chamber designed to parrot their views for the public.
Open source projects, herein defined more informally to be projects which are distributed with the source without pay or restrictions, struggle with the concept of ethics as well. We begin by covering an avenue where this comes into play, before discussing methods of redressal and concluding with perspectives.
Knee-jerk technological solutions
First with COVID-19, and now with refugees, the ability to throw up flashy platforms for “humanitarian services” is a recurrent trend. Open source tools are often used to this end, as they quickly gather eyeballs. However, these solutions are often disconnected from best practices and disseminate incorrect information or even aid human trafficking [3]. The founders of such platforms often are young or naive, and not necessarily bad actors, but they can cause outsized detrimental effects. For example, connecting vulnerable refugees with possible hosts without any kind of background check on the hosts is highly unethical.
Ethical licences
Most discussions of licensing in software typically revolve around the Free and Open Source community and related licences. These have a place at the forefront of legal discussion (though their moral position has been deeply eroded by the bad faith actions of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation). New licences (collected by the Organization for Ethical Source [4]) seek to bridge this perceived gap. The Hippocratic licence [5] for example “specifically prohibits the use of software to violate universal standards of human rights”
Punitive Measures
The FSF rarely, if ever, takes projects to court for violations of the GNU Public License, and it is by far the most litigious of the licensing bodies. Unfortunately, open-source projects and licence adherence is almost always voluntary. This complicates matters immensely. Not only are open source maintainers and projects often at risk of being unpaid labourers in larger ecosystems but it also leaves maintainers with little to no control over their own work. This is by construction mostly. Once released to the public, seasoned maintainers know better than to expect that everyone will comply with the appropriate licensing regulations (though this does not excuse anyone from flaunting regulations).
Punitive measures are hard for open source projects. Contributor bans are the first line of defence, but beyond this, some maintainers have hit back at not being paid fairly for their work by sabotaging their own projects [6]. This concept has been extended into punitive measures for ethical violations as well [7].
Perspectives
Human nature is ugly. People are, more often than not, selfish and cannot even be bothered to take the pains to read documentation or keep up with the directions of any open source project used. Developers have to internalise such thoughts. At the same time, however, blackballing bad actors and sabotaging based on location can take even more of a toll. It is hard enough to ensure support for the masses, without also taking on the burden of winnowing through the intent of the nebulous user-base. One must be pragmatic. Where bad faith is proven, or even suspected, swift and formal responses are required. FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) as a learning tool must always be available, for example, in spite of an increase in anxiety, maintainers cannot really harm projects which store copies of their code for the purpose of, say, a weapon of mass destruction. Banning a region would be more likely to harm innocent users than to grind weapons programmes to a halt. Every last one of us, though, have a duty to hold ourselves to the highest of moral and ethical standards, and this is the only path towards an egalitarian society. Software developers and scientists cannot be exempt.
References
[1] https://www.aiche.org/community/sites/committees/young-professionals/leadership
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/18/world/ukraine-russia-war#ukraine-refugee-poland-assault
[4] https://ethicalsource.dev/licenses/
[5] https://firstdonoharm.dev/