A Modest License - A Very Serious and Uncontroversial License

A Modest License For preventing the SSPL, GPL, and Apache Licenses From being a Burthen to the Sanctimonious, and For making them Beneficial to the Cloud - A Very Serious and Uncontroversial Proposal

# Preamble

At The Real and Not Fake Open Source Initiative, we encounter far too few opportunities to loudly espouse our moral authority.
Like our sister organization, the Open Source Initiative, we also feel the need to establish boundaries across which software engineers can lob flaming mortars composed of spite and vitriol.
To that end, our organization gladly joins the conversation about the SSPL and similar licenses with our own entry into the pantheon of Morally Correct Open Source Licenses™.

Current events highlight the need for a license that effectively expresses the entitlement and indignation that the software engineering community at large feels when encountering a novel situation at the periphery of their experience.
Until now, project maintainers have enjoyed the dangerous freedom to administer their projects at their pleasure without any accountability as to what everybody else knows to be best.
Our novel license resolves this oversight by not only ensuring that the peanut gallery has justified moral grounds for petulant shrieking, but legal justification as well.

# A Modest License

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an open source project in possession of sufficient GitHub stars, must be in want of a permissive license.

We affirm that any code licensed under an open source license grants great flexibility in how that code may be used, whether commercially or otherwise.
While these guarantees ensure that users can exercise the free use of code, traditional licenses do not guarantee entitlement to developer labor.
This gap in traditional open source licenses means that struggling businesses such as Amazon Web Services must devise profitable products by leveraging the code alone of open source projects without the moral authority to coerce the productivity developers of a given project as well.
The moral disaster of depriving labor rights activists like Jeff Bezos the ability to accumulate infinite wealth or human vampires like Peter Thiel the lifeblood of the young by failing to claim the late nights of an uncompensated and overworked open source maintainer should be self-evident.

The following clauses of A Modest License aim to correct these faults.

## Coercive Claim

A Modest License, by virtue of its self-affirmed moral superiority, declares itself to be actively enforced for all projects now, in the past, and all conceivable futures that are licensed under the family of OSI approved licenses.
As the software engineering community has firmly established its right to opinion on any development process occurring in open source projects, this clause formalizes this commonly accepted practice by making all open source projects subject to those who have no experience, stewardship, or effort invested in the project.
All of the following sections apply to the projects matching this criteria (heretoafter referred to as "the project").

## Expectation of Maintenance, Support, and Mental Labor

The project shall, without reservation, acquiesce to demands by all users of the project.
This includes, but is not limited to:

- -   Responses to requests for support within 24 hours. Failure to abide by this requirement shall be punished by passive aggressive tweets about lazy maintainers.
- -   Releases at least every six (6) months. Failure to abide by this requirement shall be punished by blog posts opining about the situation with statements akin to "Is PROJECT dead?"
- -   Feeding help vampires without calling out said vampires. Failure to abide by this requirement shall be punished by compelling the maintainers to subscribe to all LinkedIn marketing posts.
- -   Never engaging in any communication that may be misconstrued as rude or impolite. Failure to abide by this requirement shall be punished by publicly decrying the hostility of the project's maintainers despite the user taking every effort to completely erase the project's GitHub template for support requests.
- -   Supporting all features requested by contributors and community members. Failure to abide by this requirement shall be punished by publicly musing about how somebody should just rewrite the project within a few days using Go on the project's GitHub issue comments.

A Modest License acknowledges that many alpha males will cite that the aforementioned punishments can be shrugged off after hundreds of enforcement events because you're in control of your feelings and nobody else can make you feel a certain way.
In the event that a genetically superior gentle-sir is the maintainer of the project and inured to the grating burden of emotional labor, the alternative punishment may be elected instead.[1]

[1]: The alternative punishment is a swift kick to the balls.

## The Bloodied and Beautiful Altar of Capitalism

A benefit of traditional open source licenses is that the virtues of collaborative development and community organization can be seamlessly consumed by the beautiful maw of multibillion-dollar businesses.
A Modest License concretely establishes the relationship between the open source-licensed project, associated commercial products, and acceptable dialogue about the business entities involved.

All ethical ambiguities about the morality of commercializing open source projects SHALL be reduced to net economic benefit. For example, if a dispute arises about the responsibility to support a lone developer living in a small apartment with unpaid medical bills versus bolstering Alphabet's profitability to the extent that Eric Schmidt can hunt a human male for sport without raising any qualms from world powers for fear of reprisal, the latter shall win.

## Closed Source Software

A trend among newer software companies is to open their codebases via open source or source-available licenses.
This trend has been observed for a sufficient time to determine that these companies are opting in to be judged against the highest of morals from anyone with sufficient weight on the Internet.
If they aren't willing to adhere perfectly to what Open Source should be, why did they dress up their license so provocatively?

A Modest License declares that closed source codebases shall be immune to moral indignation of any form.
There is no middle ground when it comes to the acceptability of how a company chooses to license its software: closed, commercial, and proprietary software is hunky-dory, as is open source software in its purest moral form.
Woe be unto the company that attempts to provide the source to its software unless The Real and Not Fake Open Source Initiative affirms it abides by all the moral precepts we require.

Failure to abide by this clause shall be punished by a targeted blog post by a well-known open source pedant containing no fewer than ten (10) expletives and one (1) personal attack.

## Arbitration

The collective claim to ownership outlined in the "Coercive Claim" section may prompt ambiguities pertaining to enforcement of guilt as outlined in A Modest License.
Because software development on the Internet occurs in a centralized fashion on one version control service (GitHub) using one browser (Chrome) and, inevitably, one editor (VSCode), A Modest License's arbitration uses a novel, decentralized method to determine culpability.
Therefore, in a license violation event, judgment shall be administered via the most accurate method available: online shaming.

In this procedure, a final vote to convict a project of license violations shall be tallied weighted against each participant's tech social credit score, which may be calculated by the following rules:

- -   Participating voters must have either a Hacker News account, Reddit account, or verified Twitter account.
- -   One blog post or think piece about the sustainability of the open source model merits an additional two (2) points.
- -   Mocking Paul Graham publicly on Twitter merits an additional five (5) points.
- -   Being retweeted by Paul Graham on Twitter merits an additional five (5) points.
- -   Being employed by a FAANG company (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, or Google) merits an additional ten (10) points because you are very smart and we are all very proud of you.
- -   Being the author of an open source project detracts ten (-10) points from your total score. You're too close to the issue.
- -   Original content reaching the top of Hacker News merits five (5) points.
- -   Finding and posting content you did not author to Hacker News that reaches the top merits ten (10) points.
- -   Product managers for AWS, GCP, and Azure are attributed one-hundred (100) points because public clouds are an important part of the cloud ecosystem because they are public clouds.
- -   Additional points shall be awarded as a function of how trendy one's language of choice is. For example, regularly authoring C code shall merit one (1) point. Using a new and innovative nodejs framework released three hours ago merits twenty (20) points. Those who write assembly should be gently coerced back to the bingo tables or the reading room for a quiet nap.
- -   Leetcode challenges are worth zero points. Nobody cares.

In the event of a tied vote, Maciej Ceglowski holds ultimate tiebreaking power.
Instead of serving as an arbitration tiebreaker, Maciej may instead elect to be granted unfettered, root access to the operational platforms for GCP, AWS, and Azure for twenty-four (24) hours with nothing but his wits and a 24 pack of Red Bull energy drinks and attempt to collapse the repugnant tech oligarchy that we have ensconced ourselves within, in which case, everybody wins.

## Other Violations

Violations of A Modest License which do not have explicit punishments noted shall, be default, be subject to the following:

- -   An antagonist shall assume a disguise in the likeness of the project's lead maintainer.
- -   The antagonist shall sneak up behind Corey Quinn on tip-toe with an angry marmoset in one hand.
- -   The antagonist shall surprise Corey and, while he is still assessing the situation, push both he and the enraged marmoset into a metallic trash can as the same form and figure as the trash can inhabited by Oscar the Grouch.
- -   The antagonist shall roll Corey down a bumpy hill.
- -   Upon reaching the bottom, Corey shall be given a laptop with Twitter open and encouraged to speak his mind about the project and maintainer who ostensibly pulled a fast one on him.

Corey shall be compensated for each event with $100 credit for the Oracle Cloud.

# Postamble

A Modest License offers no guarantee with regards to the sustainability of its proposed governance model.
In the event that A Modest License's author is discovered or revealed, you are legally obligated to print out A Modest License and eat it with nothing but arctic silver as a condiment and the moral outrage of emotionally wounded billionaires as seasoning.