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Using Copyleft to spread Degrowth

I have read a lot about Climate Change lately and I have been thinking about how I can contribute to its fight.

I already try to minimize my personal footprint by:

monitoring the electricity consumption of my family (especially the "stand-by" consumption)
traveling short distances by bike (daily transportation)
traveling long distances by train (for holidays)

However, my "professional" behavior is not really there yet. I am a freelancer and even if my resource consumption is quite low (main workstation from 2016 and computing setup on a switch turned off every evening) not all of my customers are really aware of the ecological challenges ahead of us. Since I don't want to stop working with unaware customers for now (would be financially very challenging), I have been wondering how I could change the way I work with them.

Discovering Degrowth

After hearing the "Octet Vert" podcast of Tristan Nitot with Timothée Parrique, I have been reading the book "Economy of Degrowth".

[fr] Octet Vert S3E02 — Timothée Parrique sur la décroissance

[fr] Ralentir ou périr — L'économie de la décroissance — Timothée Parrique

Thesis: The political economy of degrowth — Timothée Parrique

In the chapter introducing the concept of Degrowth, I was struck by the mention of the "commons".

Degrowth highlights the importance of care work, self-organization, commons, community, open localism, and work sharing.

Degrowth on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

As a developer, I have been in contact with "Creative Commons" for a long time and until now I mainly linked this concept to a philosophical way of thinking (sharing with the world, to make it a better place). However, after reading this, I now think that "commons" is also a tool for Degrowth.

Copyleft as a tool to spread Degrowth

The two "commons" and "work sharing" aspects of Degrowth can be empowered by choosing copyleft licenses. Regarding software, there are two main categories of licenses which foster sharing:

permissive licenses, which grant the right to anyone to improve your work (CC0, MIT, Apache, CC BY)
copyleft licenses, which also add the obligation to share the improvements in some cases (GPL, AGPL, CC BY-SA)

What is copyleft? - Write Free Software

Using an open source license allows reuse by anyone and enables "work sharing" while adding the obligation to share the improvements is a way to guarantee that what you produced will stay in the "commons".

Moving forward

Whereas changing jobs or rejecting customers can be seen as high-risk decisions, I think that mandating the use of copyleft licenses is an opportunity to reflect the values of an employer/customer.

From now on, I will strongly encourage my customers to publish all software that I write under a copyleft license. If they are not receptive to my arguments, it means that our values are not aligned and that we should question our partnership.

Using Copyleft to spread Degrowth

Discovering Degrowth

Copyleft as a tool to spread Degrowth

Moving forward

Further reading on copyleft and climate change