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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
In our increasingly politicized world, it has become popular to chant "all software is political." Software builds the systems that free or constrain us, the thinking goes, and so we should withhold it from bad people. This is the thinking that has led Microsoft employees and others to decry contracts tech companies have with ICE (US Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement), insisting that their software only be sold to people they like.
[...] Over the years we as an open source community have experimented with all sorts of stupid ideas, like efforts to block anyone from using code for commercial purposes unless they pay. Each time, we've realized that as good a goal as it is for developers to get paid, for example, the destruction caused by closing off the code to uses we don't like ends up ruining the foundations upon which open source rests.
This is dramatically more important, however, when it comes to attempts to politicize open source software.
As developer Chris Cordle stated, "Nobody wins" and the "whole idea [undergirding open source] dies" ... "if an author arbitrarily picks and chooses who can and can't use it based on whoever Twittersphere is mad at this week." It doesn't matter if there is tremendous cause for that anger. Open source dies when it becomes politicized.
Source: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-politicizing-open-source-is-a-terrible-idea/
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:54PM (1 child)
Maybe the answer is that you don't develop that code. Don't be in the business of writing code that can be used to dramatically increase an entity's capability to kill.
Writing killer code for a specific government to use against its enemies might be morally acceptable, if you are the sort of person for whom blind nationalism is good and just. But writing it for consumption by the general public, so that everybody has more killing power? There's only one word for that: evil.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:06AM
That's a naive approach. Code that drives a centrifuge, as in the example, has many uses for good. Just because it can be used to other ends doesn't make it bad. Most of the tools used to find flaws in networks for the purposes of breaking in, are also used by people to secure networks. Taking away everything sharp and pointy might make you feel safe, but it makes the chef's job pretty hard.