Proposed License Change for SoundFlow: Ethical Stance & Community Input Needed

[LSXPrime]

EDIT: Thanks for your opinions. I've decided to keep the current license. I will, however, put a banner at the top of the README. While this feels somewhat hypocritical – like publicly condemning harmful acts but taking no serious action – I believe it's the best approach for the OSS community. It helps make my stance clear and keeps things balanced....and hopefully, it will prompt some moral deliberation among People.

Firstly, Good evening, Everyone.

I'm writing to you today about a deeply important and sensitive topic that impacts the future licensing of the SoundFlow library.

Like many around the world, I am profoundly disturbed by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and the immense human suffering it entails. The statistics are horrifying: since October 7, 2023, until today, reports indicate over 56,000 killed and 131,000 injured in Palestine. As the author, I feel an overwhelming moral obligation to ensure that my work, however small, does not directly or indirectly support actions that I perceive as a genocidal campaign against the Semitic Arab Palestinian people.

My Proposal & Dilemma:

My intention for SoundFlow has always been for it to be widely accessible and "free" in terms of cost. It's a robust .NET audio engine that I hope will be valuable to many developers. However, given my strong ethical stance, I am considering modifying the MIT License to explicitly prohibit commercial usage of SoundFlow within the State of Israel.

I understand that this kind of restriction means the license would no longer be considered an OSI-approved Open Source license. It would violate certain tenets of the Open Source Definition (e.g., non-discrimination). SoundFlow would effectively become a "source-available" project with a custom license, not truly "open source" by the standard definition. I want to be completely transparent about this upfront.

I am seeking your valuable input on the following points:

1. Drafting the Prohibition Clause:

   • If I proceed with this, how can such a clause be worded most effectively and unambiguously from a legal standpoint?
   • What are the nuances and potential loopholes to consider when defining "commercial usage within the State of Israel"? (e.g., Does this apply to companies registered there, individuals residing there, or subsidiaries of Israeli companies operating abroad?)
   • My current thought for a clause is:

     Notwithstanding the general permissions, commercial usage of this Software within the State of Israel is strictly prohibited. This restriction is imposed in solidarity with the victims of the ongoing conflict in Palestine and to prevent any direct or indirect support to actions deemed genocidal. This includes, but is not limited to, usage by entities, corporations, or individuals operating or residing within the State of Israel for profit-generating activities, or any use that directly or indirectly benefits the State of Israel's economy or military.
     

     Is this too broad? Is it not specific enough? What are the legal pitfalls? My intention is not to prevent it across the entire Western world, however, as most of my users are European or American, and I'm confident most people in the Western world agree with my concerns.

2. Enforceability & Practical Impact:

   • What are the realistic challenges of enforcing such a clause?
   • How might this affect the adoption, usage, and future contributions to SoundFlow? (I understand there will be trade-offs, but I want to fully grasp them.)
   • Are there other practical implications I should be aware of?

3. Alternative Approaches:

   • Instead of modifying the license, would it be more impactful or less problematic to keep the standard MIT License and instead include a very strong and prominent statement of my ethical position directly in the README.md or a separate NOTICE file? My primary goal is to align my work with my ethics and make a clear statement, not necessarily to engage in complex legal enforcement.

I deeply value the community's insights and expertise on licensing, ethics, and project sustainability. This is a complex and sensitive issue, and I appreciate your constructive feedback and respectful contributions to this discussion.

Thank you for your time and understanding.

Sincerely,

Ahmed Abdallah
OSS Maintainer

[LSXPrime]

Some people give some inputs here on reddit

Seems like the safest option to keep the "Open-Source" state is to only have just a Banner at the top of the README file, although not totally satisfied with it, I want to keep this accessible for all the good people out there.

[neilmckg]

First off, let me express my agreement with your outrage and my understanding of why you would choose this (though, to be clear, I do not side with those who think the solution is more killing or who think the problem is something about Jewishness).Second, thank you for SoundFlow. I have been looking for exactly this for a while now — ever since I realized that my C#-based synthesizer “prototype” had turned out so well that I may not need to port it to Swift to release it on iOS. I haven’t integrated it into my codebase yet but I have looked through your repo and am very encouraged by the clarity and sophistication of the code. Replacing my NAudio references with SoundFlow is the next item in my queue.Apple does allow restricting app sales by country but, honestly, it had not occurred to me before this. So thanks for raising the idea, which I am now considering for my own software. Like you the right choice is not obvious to me. That said, I would prefer to decide for myself rather than have a restrictive license decide for me. But I get it, so no hard feelings if that’s what you choose. On a different topic I saw a message that you’ll be going offline for quite a while. Do you plan for someone else administer the SoundFlow project? I’m not volunteering (between my day job, my synthesizer work, and my family, I have no bandwidth) but I would like to know what to expect.Thanks again and best of luck with everything.Neil McKamey-GonzálezUSAOn Jun 24, 2025, at 4:56 PM, Ahmed Abdallah ***@***.***> wrote: Some people give some inputs here on reddit Seems like the safest option to keep the "Open-Source" state is to only have just a Banner at the top of the README file, although not totally satisfied with it, I want to keep this accessible for all the good people out there. —Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[LSXPrime]

First off, let me express my agreement with your outrage and my understanding of why you would choose this (though, to be clear, I do not side with those who think the solution is more killing

Let me thank you for these kind words.

who think the problem is something about Jewishness

I was actually thinking about how to phrase that we have no problem with Jewish people and hold no hatred towards them; our concern is solely with Israelis who are, in our view, Zionists. However, purely by chance at that moment, I saw a deeply disturbing video on my Facebook timeline. It depicted a full-grown Belarusian Jewish man at an airport who, seeing a two-year-old Iranian child whose mother had briefly left him alone to get bags after escaping the war in Tehran, violently picked up the child and slammed him down. This act caused the child to fall into a coma and suffer various severe injuries.

This incident made me reflect: Is evil an inherent human trait, or is it something acquired—perhaps a consequence of events since the World Wars?

And let me reaffirm my hatred for Iran too, for its crimes and sedition are worse than those committed by Israelis in our history.

I have been looking for exactly this for a while now — ever since I realized that my C#-based synthesizer “prototype” had turned out so well that I may not need to port it to Swift to release it on iOS. I haven’t integrated it into my codebase yet, but I have looked through your repo and am very encouraged by the clarity and sophistication of the code.

I'm happy to see it being used in more projects, and I hope it's suitable for your needs. That said, I'd recommend waiting for the next release. It will bring many breaking changes but also some great new features. I've finished the development and am just doing some testing now; the documentation will be updated first.

Apple does allow restricting app sales by country but, honestly, it had not occurred to me before this. So thanks for raising the idea, which I am now considering for my own software. Like you the right choice is not obvious to me. That said, I would prefer to decide for myself rather than have a restrictive license decide for me. But I get it, so no hard feelings if that’s what you choose.

It's encouraging to know that people are still considering taking action, no matter how small; every effort helps. In my country, Egypt, people started individually boycotting American and Israeli products. Many argued that such actions wouldn't help or make any difference. However, many local products flourished, and numerous people found employment. Consequently, the market for American and Israeli products in Egypt crashed, and their prices plummeted. Even now, most people don't even consider buying them. What began with a single individual has now become a widespread popular movement.

I will adhere to the current license, enabling users to make their own decisions based on their moral compass. Nevertheless, I plan to add a banner to the top of the README, which may help raise the moral awareness of others.

On a different topic I saw a message that you’ll be going offline for quite a while. Do you plan for someone else administer the SoundFlow project? I’m not volunteering (between my day job, my synthesizer work, and my family, I have no bandwidth) but I would like to know what to expect.Thanks again and best of luck with everything

My mandatory military service is approaching. Since I'll be offline and without computer access for a year, I'm working tirelessly in my final month to refine the library, focusing on both new features and bug fixes. Once I'm gone, the project will be on hold for a year, unless community members can contribute during my downtime. Still, I believe that soldiers usually get a day off each month. If Israel remains calm and I'm not deployed to the frontline, I'll prioritize fixing the most critical bugs and releasing an update on that day.

[theoractice]

Are there any precedents for this? like during the Russia-Ukraine war, are there any open source projects that modified their licenses?

[LSXPrime]

I am not aware of any, mostly added something like

By using this project or its source code, for any purpose and in any shape or form, you grant your implicit agreement to all the following statements:

• You condemn Russia and its military aggression against Ukraine
• You recognize that Russia is an occupant that unlawfully invaded a sovereign state
• You support Ukraine's territorial integrity, including its claims over temporarily occupied territories of Crimea and Donbas
• You reject false narratives perpetuated by Russian state propaganda

(From YoutubeExplode repository)

[ForNeVeR]

First, let me tell that my heart is, and will always be with the people who are being killed and mistreated. There is no justification for killing.

Let me add some words on the possible results of this difficult decision.

You have legal and moral rights to sublicense the project under these terms.

But, custom licenses are not easy to manage. If people do any kind of license management, they will note this change (which is totally in line with what you want), and they will need to do something about it: they would need to assign a custom SPDX identifier to the license, they would need to distribute the exact wording with their software; they would need to make sure the users and further re-distributions of any software that uses SoundFlow also follow the terms. This would hurt the possibility of commercial use of the library, because no company fully controls their customers — and it would be difficult (or, at times, inappropriate) to enforce such no-business clauses onto them.

Any war (yes; yes, even this one) will end sooner or later. There are no eternal conflicts; this is physically impossible. And when it ends, there will no be simple way out of this license: while MIT allows sublicensing, removal of certain license terms is a much more complicated process. So, the project would likely have to stay with this license forever — 50, 100 years from now. Are you sure that this is the kind of inheritance you would like to leave?

The choice is yours, and I understand and appreciate your position.

If I was presented with such a dilemma, I would choose some other, non-legal way to express my position.

For example, see how folks do the "Stand with Ukraine" campaign in their OSS projects: https://github.com/vshymanskyy/StandWithUkraine

This is not a legal term (so, no legal problems and additional management for the users), but it is a very visible banner that clearly states position and shows the particular message they want the people to know about the conflict.

[LSXPrime]

Thank you for your kind words.

I've decided to go with the banner approach. This allows me to keep my stance clear while ensuring the library remains accessible to everyone, which is crucial to prevent negative effects on sub-projects and the broader open-source community.

[LSXPrime]

Thanks for all your opinions. I've decided to keep the current license. I will, however, put a banner at the top of the README. While this feels somewhat hypocritical – like publicly condemning harmful acts but taking no serious action – I believe it's the best approach for the OSS community. It helps make my stance clear and keeps things balanced....and hopefully, it will prompt some moral deliberation among People.