[scikit-learn] climate friendly software licence

[Olivier Grisel]

Hi Sole,

I personally support climate change actions very much and I am
convinced climate change is the number 1 challenge of our time. In an
attempt to act in a consistent way with that belief, I declined
several times to keynote at conferences either organized by the fossil
fuel industry or to conferences that would have required me to fly a
long distance to give a presentation.

However, I don't think software licensing is a right tool to advance this cause.

How would we enforce it? What would happen if we don't enforce it? Who
is "we", especially when our library is embedded in 3-rd party
software product and the end-users are not necessarily aware of all
the upstream dependencies?

What about gray-cases, e.g. a company that does not fossil directly
extraction per-se but works as a consultancy with a majority of
customers in the fossil fuel extraction industry? What if a
significant part of their consultancy is to help them detect methane
leaks in satellite data? How would we audit this? With which
resources? How would we get a consensual decision on those gray cases?

What about the hypocrisy of using or contributing to software under
that license while regularly using fossil fuel powered transportation
or in a working or leaving building heated with fossil fuels? Or
buying goods transported this way over long distances?

Instead, I would rather encourage everyone to vote for legislators and
governments that progressively set bans on the development and
commercialization of fossil fuel based technologies and to voice your
support for such legislations in public debates. I encourage everybody
to look twice before accepting to work for a company involved in
fossil fuel extraction one way or another or involved in fossil-fuel
intensive activities.

-- 
Olivier