What the draft is trying to protect
Remembrance means keeping public memory alive together—and not forgetting violations. The draft begins from four freedoms: use, study, modify, and share. It then adds a condition: those freedoms may not be used to harm people or concentrate unaccountable power.
The copyleft intention
The current draft uses the GNU AGPLv3 as an architectural reference. It aims to require source disclosure for modified network services and to carry the same ethical conditions into derivatives.
This combination is legally novel. The copyleft and ethical layers need specialist counsel before the project can honestly call the license finished.
Uses the draft refuses
- Mass surveillance, social-credit scoring, biometric tracking, and predictive policing.
- Autonomous weapons and systems intended to cause physical harm.
- Deception at scale, dark-pattern engagement maximisation, and addiction-engineered feeds.
- Labor and human-rights abuse.
- Ecological destruction or its concealment.
- Speculative financial extraction such as pump-and-dump or Ponzi-shaped systems.
What remains permitted
Security research, education, journalism, harm reduction, and interoperability are intended to remain available when their purpose is accountability or defence rather than the prohibited harm.
Why we do not call it open source
Field-of-use restrictions conflict with the OSI Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition. That creates real compatibility and adoption costs. The project accepts that trade-off deliberately, so the site should say ethical source or source available—never pretend the distinction does not exist.
The next honest step
Ion Commons intends to seek counsel experienced in ethical-source and source-available licensing, clarify the copyright-holding steward, and complete the definitions, venue, severability, patent, and enforcement language before v1.0.