Announcing the Release of The AntiRacist License v0.6 on Juneteenth 2022

A personal note from Dawn Wages written calling friends to action.

Sometimes, I get embarrassed at what I don’t already know.

At The Root was founded in June of 2020, as our FAQ describes, in response to “[t]he increased interdependence of software on people’s lives, the need for the internet to be viewed as a utility, and the context of the politics in 2020.”

To give a little more background: I was an incredibly depressed freelance software consultant. I recorded ~20 hours of work for the month when my goal was at least 6 times that. I continued to feel helpless in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner and so many others. Each story hitting me in parts that I thought had hardened; each story creating a new way to feel unsafe that I had yet to evaluate. I felt small and even after creating At The Root, I didn’t feel much bigger. I had a crisis of confidence through several levels of my life which made me question my personal and professional relationships. At the risk of learning something new, and revealing that there is much I still didn’t know how to address, I dared to dream of a world where the material works of my field were held accountable for the damage they caused to people marginalized by race or attributes commonly conflated with race. The answer will never be more code, or to “just be good” — the answer was community. It started from experience and grew to be something more. I aimed to materially change the lives of people who interact with software, and in it’s pursuit this cause has materially changed my life.

Q. What is the difference between an Open Source License and an Ethical Source License?
A. Open Source Licenses allow code to be freely used, modified and shared, but describes the limitations of its derivative works in the realm of capitalism. Ethical Source Licenses also allows for software to be freely used, modified and shared, but describes the limitation of its derivative works with Ethical Standards.
To learn more about Ethical Source Licenses, visit https://ethicalsource.dev/principles/