Ethical Considerations Towards Protestware

TL;DR

This paper explores the ethical challenges of protestware in open source libraries, analyzing how maintainer motivations and stakeholder influences complicate trust and responsibility in software development.

Contribution

It provides an ethical framework for understanding protestware, highlighting the multifaceted motivations behind maintainer decisions and the implications for open source trust.

Findings

Protestware can be malicious or benign, affecting trust in open source.

Maintainer motivations include personal, social, and financial factors.

Stakeholder influences shape the decision to create protestware.

Abstract

A key drawback to using a Open Source third-party library is the risk of introducing malicious attacks. In recently times, these threats have taken a new form, when maintainers turn their Open Source libraries into protestware. This is defined as software containing political messages delivered through these libraries, which can either be malicious or benign. Since developers are willing to freely open-up their software to these libraries, much trust and responsibility are placed on the maintainers to ensure that the library does what it promises to do. Using different frameworks commonly used in AI ethics, we illustrate how an open-source maintainer's decision to protest is influenced by different stakeholders (viz., their membership in the OSS community, their personal views, financial motivations, social status, and moral viewpoints), making protestware a multifaceted and intricate matter.