Last week Tuesday I participated in a German podcast by CCC's board member Peter Hecko about a non-military clause in the GNU GPL, or other usage restrictions in Free Software licenses. At the FSF 30 birthday party I talked with Peter about Thorsten Schröder's talk "Free Software against our freedom" at the Chaos Communication Congress, and he invited me for this podcast.

A tank

If you understand German, you can now listen to the podcast. Else my main arguments in a nutshell were: "military" is really difficult to define, it is questionable if someone who kills people would stick to a copyright license, or if it would help anything if military is not allowed to use the Free Software. Furthermore I explained that in the Free Software movement---which is a worldwide movement---we have many different value systems. While some values are shared more widely, there are others people disagree on. We would end up with hundreds of licenses or license additions. We already have way too much licenses at the moment, but such usage restrictions would make it almost impossible to develop software together. By using such restrictions you would also make it hard for everybody who wants to do "good" things with software.

Most of the arguments from the podcast are covered in Richard's article "Why programs must not limit the freedom to run them" which is translated into several languages.