Clause 6 of the Open Source Definition ( http://opensource.org/osd-annotated ) states that open source software licenses cannot discriminate against fields of endeavor. That is, you can't state in your license that an abortion clinic / anti-abortion activists can't use the software and still call it open source.

Right. Because "open source" no longer fits, you'd need a new name for software released under the anti-surveillance license. "Freedom Software" instead of "Free Software" has a nice ring to it. :)

It's not open source if you specify who can and cannot use it. There was some bit of software years ago that had a clause like "no neonazis may use this software", and it got DQ'ed from Debian because that made it not free software.

It's a bit like free speech: you really want to be very, very careful about limiting what people can say.

That reminds me of this blog post – http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502/ibm-and-its-minions

Not likely to happen - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

> The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

No, you can't revoke their license to use the software they already have, only them breaching the license would lose them the right to use it.

You could change the licensing so that they are not allowed to use future versions, but then that's no longer open source software. The open source definition[0] says:

"5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons."

The last issue you get with this idea is whether the NSA is the most unethical user of these pieces of software, I seriously doubt that is the case. Then you need to introduce clauses to ban everyone else who you feel doesn't behave in the manner you'd like. That'll be fun.

[0] http://opensource.org/osd-annotated

They they can't. Most (all?) of the opensource licenses do not have the "revokable clause" with them.

Ok. What happens if GNU decides to Fork the GPL v3 and call it "GPLv3+NSA Exception" and then relicense all their code to this new forked license?

A clause in this forked license is that the NSA can't use it.

That's an addition, not an exception. An exception would say "you must the GPL, unless you are/are doing xyz, in which case you can use abc license". You are saying "you can use the GPL, unless you are/are doing xyz, in which case you can't". That clause cannot legally be inserted in the GPL.

You cannot apply license _retroactively_. Once you release code version under a certain License, the License is associated with that version of the code.

They threw out the 4th amendment without notifying the public, do you really think any software license is going to make a difference?

Really, this is not the way to go

And besides, how would you audit it?!