I've gotten into a lot of arguments with people about the word Open, from multiple perspectives. I've had people argue to me that Open is incorrect because Copyleft licenses restrict people's ability to restrict other people's freedom. I've had people argue to me that Open is incorrect because permissive licenses don't restrict people's ability to restrict other people's freedom. I've had the Source Available crowd argue to me (I would claim somewhat disingenuously) that the Open Source movement is committing some kind of bizarre "moral offense" by implying that Source Available software isn't open or libre by our definitions.

In general, I don't give those arguments a lot of weight. There is no completely global agreed-upon definition of what "open" means, but used in the context of Open Source and software licensing, it represents a community-decided, longstanding set of values that are reasonably understood by most people to be at least adjacent to open access and user freedom.

When I think about Ethical Source licenses -- I'm in the Open Source movement, I think there are downsides to trying to dictate how people use software and what they can do with it, even evil people. I'm also somewhat skeptical that allowing individual owners to dictate what they mean by "ethical" is sustainable long-term. Part of the reason Open Source is still around is that we don't allow people to dictate what they mean by Open, we have a set of standards, and if your license doesn't follow those standards, tough luck, you're out. We don't allow a lot of ambiguity. Even though Ethical Source does have community structures in place to work more democratically, I still worry when I look at the Ethical Source licenses whether this is a community that can survive future schisms over its values.

But, having said that, I'm still hard-pressed to think of another word I would prefer over Ethical. Regardless of any disagreements over whether their approach is feasible or practical, it's still an accurate summation of what they're trying to do. These are licenses that dictate access based on a kind of moral adherence. There is of course a little bit of marketing going on with the term Ethical (in the same way that there's a bit of marketing going on with Open), and of course there is no completely global agreed-upon definition of what "ethical" means (same as with open/libre). But the point of terminology like Open/Ethical is not to perfectly encapsulate everyone's philosophical views of what those words mean, they're to describe coordinated movements that try to align themselves with those words.

Whenever some Source Available grifter starts complaining to me that the OSI shouldn't get to define what Open means for everyone, I try not to take the bait, I try to remind them that Open Source is a community with community-defined definitions, and as long as those terms aren't wildly deceptive we're going to keep using them, thank you very much. So I kind of have the same response here: people can disagree with whether the Ethical Source licenses are actually ethical (the same as they can disagree with whether Copyleft licenses are open), but ultimately, it's a community that's defining its own terms, and I think if it's not being obviously deceptive it has some right to do that.