Why now?

Despite the urgency of our planet's climate crisis, oil production is at an all-time high. The use of new technology is one of the main reasons behind the growth. Reservoirs that were deemed too costly to harvest are now being harvested with new equipment, better industrial processes, and increasingly specialized software. At this rate, most oil and gas company's projected oil production is only set to increase.

Most recently, Big Oil has begun to use cloud computing, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate fossil fuel extraction. Specialists have also begun to call AI the next "productivity revolution in the Oil & Gas industry" and are increasingly depending open source technologies to increase their efficiency. In their profit-maximizing short-sightedness, oil and gas companies are ramping up with new software to automate and optimize oil production.

By adopting the Climate Strike License, developers can explicitly prohibit the use of their software within some of the largest oil companies including Chevron, BP, Exxon Mobil, and many other companies that turn a blind eye to the greatest threat that humanity has faced.

This license reminds developers that we have the power to stop these multinational oil companies from taking advantage of open source software -- that instead of waiting idly by, that they can take an active position in preventing a climate catastrophe.

While the Climate Strike License violates the Open Source Initiative's canonical Open Source Definition, which explicitly excludes licenses that limit re-use "in a specific field of endeavor", we feel that as tech workers, we should take responsibility in how our software is used, and that the urgency of climate change cannot be limited by the ideological position of open source software. Instead, we want adopters of the Climate Strike License to take a bold stance in the fight to save the planet.