I can't help but notice that organisations constantly co-opt free software which was developed with the intent to promote freedom, use it to spread hate and ideas which will ultimately infringe on freedom for many.

The fact that hateful people who use such software may then go on to use it to promote or otherwise support fascism which prevents others from enjoying the software in the way it was imagined, is one potential manifestation of the paradox of tolerance in this respect. I think this is particularly true for e.g. social media platforms and the fediverse.

My proposal to combat this would be the introduction of a "paradox of tolerance" license which says that organisations which use the software must enforce a bare-minimum set of rules to combat intolerance. So anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, etc. The idea is then to make overtly hateful organisations legally liable for the use of the software through the incompatibility of the requirements with their hateful belief system.

This could be an extension to GPL and AGPL where the license must be replicated in modified versions of the software, thereby creating virality with these rules.

Is this a thing already? I understand OS and FOSS have historically had a thing for political neutrality but are we not starting to find the faults with this now?

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[–] LemoineFairclough@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

I think it's important to consider that the GNU General Public License is really only a part of the Free Software Movement, which is "An effort by a group of people to achieve a social or political goal". That movement is defined by a group of people and a goal and has "infrastructure", such as "The Free Software Foundation" ("a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization"). "The idea of the Free Software Movement is that computer users deserve the freedom to form a community", but if you want to accomplish a different goal, it might be useful to clearly communicate that goal to other people to create a different movement (and create new "infrastructure" to support your effort).

Changing only a part of the GNU General Public License might make it incoherent or otherwise a hindrance to your goal in a way that you might not expect. It might be better to focus on talking with other people about a goal of yours, and you might discover that you can be most effective without investing any energy in creating a new license for software, but if you determine that creating a new license is important you can create a comprehensive design for one to match your efforts more closely.

It seems that your goal might be summarized with "I want people to be able to help themselves (using software) without contributing to spreading hate" ("putting a motion in the positive is a rule in parliamentary procedures").

See also "Chesterton’s Lamp-Post" (a suggestion to only start to act when you actually know what you want the final result to be) and "Chesterton's fence" (a suggestion to not change things when you don't know what the final result will be) for some context about what an undesirable design/plan is.