The JSON License famously includes a provision stating that “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil”.

This article explores why such provisions are not useful or meaningful in the greater software licensing conversation.

“Evil” is largely part of the software licensing conversation today because of a much earlier line drawn in the sand by open source software licensing proponents demanding that compliant licenses permit use for “Evil” (and consequently, placing a hard restriction on the individual freedom to refuse).

This line in the sand has inspired licenses which, in reaction, are positioned as “anti-Evil”, “Good”, “moral” or “ethical” software licenses.

Traditional open source is based on the flawed premise that technology is fundamentally neutral, and that unrestricted access to source code— even for explicitly “evil” purposes— is in fact an unqualified good. But around the world, open source developers are starting to realize that the software that they create, with its tremendous potential to change the world for the better, is also being abused to sustain and promote systems of inequity and injustice, globally, and at unprecedented scale.

– Hippocratic License 3.0 (HL3): An Ethical License for Open Source

As software developers we often have a particular weakness for the desire to codify whatever we get our hands on, and in some cases, this extends to software licensing.

This desire is clearly visible in the approach of the Hippocratic License, which provides a “License Builder” web application allowing the user to select from an enumerated list of available modules such as the “Taliban module”, the “US Tariff Act module” and the “Boycott / Divestment / Sanctions module”.

When our once (supposedly) commonly held contemporary definitions of evil such as the abuse, harm and murder of children have so recently been left shattered, and entire societies carve out spaces for the celebration and ridicule of the suffering of children targeted in a multi-year live-streamed campaign of genocide, this approach of codifying such slippery things as “evils” into modules inspires little confidence.

In invoking an abstract concept of “Evil” when setting restrictions on the individual freedom to refuse, open source licensing proponents have used framing to set a very effective trap.

Having acknowledged its irrelevance in the software licensing conversation, we can now shed entirely the terminology of “Good and Evil” imposed by open source licensing proponents, and instead focus on the conditions and contradictions that we observe today and their lineages, beginning through the lens of Palestine.

You are Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, and you face a choice. Hitler has just come to power in Germany, and you are considering whether to direct your German subsidiary, Dehomag, to bid for the job of tabulating the results of a census the Nazi government wants to conduct. While you are making up your mind in your New York office, the local papers swell with stories of anti-Semitic outrages committed by that government. On March 18, 1933, The New York Times reports that the Nazis have ousted all Jewish professionals—lawyers, doctors, teachers—from their jobs. A front-page story under the headline “German Fugitives Tell of Atrocities at Hands of Nazis” describes Brown Shirts dragging Jews out of a Berlin restaurant and forcing them to run a gauntlet of kicks and blows such that the face of the last man through “resembled a beefsteak.” Other stories tell of Jews being forced to clean the streets with toothbrushes, of book burnings, of 10,000 refugees fleeing Germany, and of 30,000 people—Jews, political prisoners, gays, and others—imprisoned in concentration camps. On March 27, virtually outside your window on Broadway, a crowd of more than 50,000 at a Madison Square Garden mass rally demands that American firms boycott Nazi Germany. In these circumstances, with this knowledge, will you, Thomas Watson, bid for the census contract?

– Jack Beatty - Hitler’s Willing Business Partners (2001)

We know that there is a clear relationship between corporations which expend focused energy explicitly and implicitly promoting the use of Open Source Initiative-approved licenses to independent developers, and the genocide being committed in Palestine.

We know that the value of software produced by independent developers is significant, and that corporations explicitly and implicitly promoting the use of open source licenses to independent developers are the primary beneficiaries of a tremendous transfer of value (in the form of open source software) from the working class (independent developers).

Software produced by independent developers has a significant Use-Value, but it’s Exchange-Value is explicitly set at zero by the dominant software licensing culture promoted by corporations with the extensive resources at their disposal.

A Contradiction emerges in which corporations like Microsoft can use dark patterns in products like GitHub to steer each new generation of independent developers towards the use of software licenses which set the Exchange-Value of their labor to zero by default, while themselves appropriating the high Use-Value of that labor, and employing it in the pursuit of ends which independent developers may have otherwise exercised their individual freedom to refuse if propositioned with (such as the commission of genocide).

While corporations were once opposed to this model of software licensing, fearing the reduction of the Exchange-Value of their own products as a side effect of its widespread adoption, they ultimately realized that this software licensing model represented another socialized model of production which could be privately appropriated.

An approximate estimate of the capacity of markets is also made, and the associations “divide” them up amongst themselves by agreement. Skilled labour is monopolised, the best engineers are engaged; the means of transport are captured—railways in America, shipping companies in Europe and America. Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production […]

Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognised free competition remains, and the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.

– Владимир Ленин - Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)

In 2025, corporations have successfully convinced a majority of independent developers across multiple generations to willingly set the Exchange-Value of their works to zero, and in doing so, now maintain their power both through economic control and the establishment of their preferred licensing model (for others) as the accepted cultural norm among independent developers.

Surplus-Value and its extraction has traditionally referred to the difference between the value created by workers and the compensation they receive in the form of wages. Through the successful efforts of corporations to establish open source software licensing as the cultural norm and the resulting reduction of the Exchange-Value of the works of independent developers to zero, Surplus-Value is maximized from the corporate perspective.

With these developments, Surplus-Value extraction in this context has been refined to remove dependencies on both worker compensation and ownership of the means of production, and instead operates and propagates itself primarily through ideology and cultural hegemony.

A hegemonic cultural order tries to frame all competing definitions of the world within its range. It provides the horizon of thought and action within which conflicts are fought through, appropriated (i.e., experienced), obscured (i.e., concealed as a “national interest” which should unite all conflicting parties) or contained (i.e., settled to the profit of the ruling class).

A hegemonic order prescribes, not the specific content of ideas, but the limits within which ideas and conflicts move and are resolved. Hegemony always rests on force and coercion, but “the normal exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterised by the combination of force and consent . . . without force predominating excessively over consent.” Hegemony thus provides the base line and the base structures of legitimation for ruling-class power.

Hegemony works through ideology, but it does not consist of false ideas, perceptions, definitions. It works primarily by inserting the subordinate class into the key institutions and structures which support the power and social authority of the dominant order. It is, above all, in these structures and relations that a subordinate class lives its subordination.

Often, this subordination is secured only because the dominant order succeeds in weakening, destroying, displacing or incorporating alternative institutions of defence and resistance thrown up by the subordinate class.

– John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, Brian Roberts - Subcultures, Cultures and Class (1975)

Today we find ourselves in an unmistakably adversarial environment, and it is within the context of this adversarial environment that we must conduct our analysis, test our ideas in concrete work, and share our findings so that we might learn what is correct and positive, what must be further developed, what is irrelevant and negative, and what must be discarded.

We must move past the idea of software licenses which position themselves within the “Good/Evil” framework imposed on the software licensing conversation by open source licensing proponents both corporate and individual. To engage in the software licensing conversation within this imposed framework is to engage upon a flawed premise.

The ideas we explore in concrete work should be informed by what open source licensing proponents seek to restrict (the individual freedom to refuse), the tools they employ (software licensing), the language they attempt to monopolize (“Free as in Freedom”), and what the established systems and cultural norms do in practice (condition workers to willingly divorce the Use-Values of their works from their Exchange-Values in order to facilitate an ongoing mass transfer of value from the working class to corporations).

The role of hegemony is to ensure that, in the social relations between the classes, each class is continually reproduced in its existing dominant-or-subordinate form.

– John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, Brian Roberts - Subcultures, Cultures and Class (1975)