Matt sez, "In an attempt to prevent military applications of their project to create networked P2P supercomputing clusters, the developers of GPU (Gnutella Processing Unit) have 'patched' their version of the General Public License to add Asimov's First Law of Robotics."
… "the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed."
It's a funny gag, but I'm inclined to believe that this is unenforceable — it suggests, for example, that if you modify the software and add it to a pacemaker that fails because of a bug, you're violating the terms. The Hactivismo Public License Enhanced-Source
Software License Agreement (thanks, Myles) tried a variant on this some years ago, adding a clause that prohibited weakening security, but there's no good empirical measure of whether one has weakened or strengthened the security of a system (for example, what if you increase the number of bits in your key, but accidentally introduce an implementation error that invites a new avenue of attack?). In both cases, making fundamentally innocuous steps can result in a license. If you believed that this license was enforceable, you'd be best off not using this software.
(Thanks, Matt!)
