Comment by jgaa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jgaa | Hacker News Reader

Governments will always do evil. Not to everyone, all of the time - but they are by nature evil.

When I wrote the War FTP Daemon in 1996, as freeware, this became a problem to me. I did want to give away my work for free, but I did not want any government agency to abuse it. So I came up with a solution - a GPL license with an additional clause - that the government - any government - could not use it for any purpose.

Someone actually complained to the Free Software Foundation about this clause, and they concluded, at that time, that it was permissible.

In years to follow I received many emails from universities, schools, hospitals, research facilities - with requests to use the software. In most cases I granted them permission. But by doing it this way, I could sleep well at night - knowing that my software could not - legally - be used to separate children from parents, or for any other evil purpose by any governments around the globe.

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War Software series Copyright (C) 1996 - 2018 by Jarle (jgaa) Aase (www.jgaa.com) This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation version 2 of the License - WITH THE FOLLOWING RESTRICTIONS:

  * GOVERNMENTS, GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES OR COMMERCIAL
    COMPANIES OWNED 50% OR MORE BY THE GOVERNMENT ARE
    NOT ALLOWED TO USE THE SOFTWARE OR SORCE CODE FOR
    ANY PURPOSE. THIS RESTRICTION ALSO APPLIES FOR
    PROGRAMS DERIVED FROM THE SOURCE CODE, OR PROGRAMS/
    SOURCE CODE THAT USE SPECIAL TECHNICS/ALOGRITHMS
    INVENTED IN THIS SOFTWARE.

  * THE FULL SOURCE CODE IS WITHELD FROM A PUBLIC RELEASE
    UNTIL THE LINUX VERSION IS RELEASED.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

> Governments will always do evil. Not to everyone, all of the time - but they are by nature evil.

If a lot of people assume this, then eventually behaviour happens according to the expectation. Within Netherlands I assume the government is usually there to make things better (though there are exceptions). What is considered better might be completely different, but still, it's assumed to be better.

I've since have a few friends who work for a municipality. It's quite refreshing to notice that they're way more open to try and do good for everyone. Unfortunately there's more populism (ignore facts, just follow assumptions).

It seems better to actively ensure that people should be improving things to ensure there's an environment where bad behaviour is frowned upon.

>> Governments will always do evil. Not to everyone, all of the time - but they are by nature evil.

>If a lot of people assume this

I come from Norway - by many assumed to be among the most human and decent countries in the world.

When a refugee storm hit Norwegian borders a few years ago, the cabinet assigned Antichrist herself, Sylvi Listhaug, to deal with it. It would not surprise me if Trump's advisers had her misdeeds (and results) in mind when they designed their current policy.

That's Norway - the country who hands out the Nobel Peace Price.

Do yo know how Norway gets rid of it's aging population? They thirst them to death. No assisted death option like in the Netherlands. Just unimaginable pain and fear at the and of life.

In Norway today, a man is serving life in prison for murdering and raping a 8 year old girl. He is innocent. Everybody knows he is innocent. But the Justice system is incapable of admitting mistakes - so he remains in jail.

I don't want to make software for governments. Because, even those who hand out Peace Prices and pretend to be soo accepting and liberal - even those commit unimaginable evil every single day of the year.

I don't know anything about Sylvi Listhaug, assisted death in Norway or the man allegedly falsely accused. You might be right about all of it but it still comes across as a ridiculous combination of strawman arguments and conflating the entire public sector and all laws into suspicious "government". Basically it boils down to "because it's not perfect, it's evil".

Would you rather there was no government?

It's quite a leap from: "Any government will do things that I consider evil" to "Governments [...] are by nature evil." Especially as context suggests you don't mean this to read "Governments are by nature capable of both evil and good." [1]

The former is almost trivially true, at least in the narrow reading supported by your examples, mostly a function of their size. The latter a vast sweeping philosophical generalization that is backed up by nothing.

All your examples show is that there are instances of them failing to live up to your ethical standards (which it seems I largely share). Would you rather have no laws than imperfect laws? No justice than imperfect justice?

[1] That would make it a non-sequitur that you would single out governments but are OK with individuals and corporations using your software.

The whole concept of liberalism is based on the assumption that governments are extremely dangerous and potentially evil and in need of constant control by both the public and it's own institutions. Even if it appears that a specific government or institution is doing good work, it is extremely dangerous to accept that as anything other than a temporary and potentially deceiving state of affairs.

Constant distrust and suspicion of power is crucial to a free and prosperous society. Politicians, officials and even private executives should never receive praise from the public, if they are doing good work the public should just shrug and say to themselves "yeah, ok, you're not horrible right now". Governments are never good, at best they are not actively harmful.

> Governments are never good, at best they are not actively harmful.

Except of course, when they are doing good.

Government is essential and its hard - attempting to juggle the needs and rights of diverse and disparate people. I get tired of the mantra that the people involved in government are inherently evil, bad, out for themselves etc. Many people who get into politics do so out of a true desire to make the lives of their fellows better - whether you agree with their stances or not.

I'm not saying that it is inherently evil, I'm saying that you as a member of the public must assume that it at least has that potential at all times for it to function as intended.

And the grand-(N)-parent 'bkor already answered this by saying that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, the government has potential for doing enormous evils, which comes from its very nature - it's large and has monopoly on violence. But people having a cooperative, instead of antagonistic approach to government helps that potential to go unfulfilled.

That's a very cynical view of government and of society in general. You basically don't trust other people to do good just for good's sake. I'm going to assume that this view is informed by your own experiences, but your personal experience might not hold up everywhere. I'm originally from the Netherlands as well, and while the government does fuck up, life is still better with a government than without, so in the balance it would seem to me that government is a force for good.

Governments are what happen when a group of people live in a community too large and complicated to be governed by an ad-hoc group of elders talking it out. Governments are what happen when humans want to trade in an organized fashion. Governments are what happen when people don't want to be in a constant state of conflict, inter and intra group. Governments are what happen if your community wants to live by the rule of principle and consensus (law), as opposed to rule of the mighty. In other words, government is inevitable.

Government is only inevitable, only if you believe in these sets of prerequisites for constructing a government. These all can be managed without government should the people want it. It's called anarchy, not the neo-modern destructive type, but the real ideology actually sets this out very well, that government is not needed. It is to everyone's own opinion whether or not you need government and what each of us want from government. But to outright state that we can't exist without it, I think is wrong.

>managed without government [...] It's called anarchy

If people agree to "manage" something, you'll end up with something that acts very much like a <scarequote>government</scarequote>.

The issue with talking about "anarchy" is that it's very easy to slip into semantic word games instead of looking at the underlying concept of how humans behave.

One reason "governments" or "managing" happens is that the real world has finite resources that's simultaneously desired by multiple people. E.g. there's a desirable piece of land. Since more than 1 person wants that land and since multiple can't live in the same spot, a conflict occurs. This eventually leads to a subset of people that make rules for others to follow. Whether you call that subset a "government" or "leaderless anarchy with unacknowledged rule-makers (wink)(wink)" is academic. (This is related to the joke, "we are all equal but some are more equal than others.")

If we depend on abolishing the idea of "property" to support the implementation of "anarchy", it still devolves to semantic word games because humans will invent equivalent euphemisms to "ownership" such as "99-year leases" or "temporary stewards of this land as communicated by a God", etc. Whatever people decide to call the control of that land, it's functionally equivalent to "property ownership".

This "resource limit" pattern repeats itself in the digital realm. Theoretically, there can be 7 billion people each with their own cryptocoin of which mad_tortoise_coin is one. However, these 7 billion individual blockchains are not useful. On the other hand, if people want to converge on a single blockchain cryptocurrency (such as Bitcoin) with stable attributes, a governance model will have to emerge. There's no way around it. If we still insist that we can have "anarchy" in Bitcoin because people can fork it, you eventually get "governance_0002" emerging in bitcoin_fork0002. Nobody "owns" the entire Bitcoin blockchain but nevertheless, participants still want to own pieces of it via public/private key pairs.

The collection of behavior that trends into a <group> that's functionally equivalent to something called "government", and a <concept> that's functionally equivalent to "ownership" seems to be embedded in the human condition.

While I haven't read the actual scholarly anarchist stuff, I hung out with some bookish lefty radicals in my college years and early 20s. What I saw then was a lot of attempts at alternative and non-hierarchical forms of organization, all of which seemed to evolve into something that could fairly be called government, if these attempts got far enough before falling apart.

> These all can be managed without government should the people want it

You say this as if the predictions of a social theory are as reliable as those of Newtonian physics. I don't think they are. And because I know of no historical example of an industrialized society functioning sustainably without a government, I tend to doubt a theory that says it's possible. Because if it was, you would think somewhere, somehow, it would have been successful already.

Anarchy can only exist until someone does something bad enough that other people ban together to stop them. This tends to happen quite quickly under anarchy, thus forming governments (even if they are just local militia enforcing their will as despots).

Governments can only not exist when the population density is so low that people only interact when they want to and can cease interaction when they so desire. This is extremely low population density, and given the increased range technology gives us, there are very few places that have this low of a density, and even then it only lasts as long as the density doesn't increase due to some migration event.

Any entity with enough power, may use this power to do evil.

It can be a government or a corporation.

Al least, in our democracies, you can decide the government with your vote.

I don't think it really matters who you vote for. The people who seek power are often the people you really, really should not grant any power.

I think the problem is most western societies is really that there is no accountability for wrong doings. If a politician promotes a law that has huge, negative consequences, she will not be held responsible in any way for those consequences. As long as she succeed in deceiving the public - she will win elections and continue to abuse her power. The same goes for the "foot soldiers" in the bureaucracy, justice system, health care etc.

If a prosecutor holds back evidence and lies to the court, to get someone convicted - it has no consequences for him even if that is later proven, and even if the sentence is nullified and the person released. The victim may suffer from post traumatic stress for the rest of his life. The prosecutor goes on with his misconduct. The same goes for judges. I caught a judge in Norway deliberately breaking EU law (denying a defendant to examine witnesses) - and he even admitted that to me after the trial - it was "convenient" for him to run his court that way. It was convenient for him to just ignore one of the core principles of the justice system - the right to a fair trial. He did this regularly, and as far as I know, he's still working as a judge. (I was shocked, and contacted the agency responsible for running the courts in Norway - who confirmed to me that he was indeed breaking the law - and then did nothing).

I am an optimist. I think governments can be fixed. But I don't think the politicians will have accountability for themselves, and their servants, as a high priority any time soon. In the mean time, I don't want their bad apples to use my free work!

> Al least, in our democracies, you can decide the government with your vote.

Though that ability is diluted as we make every little thing a national issue.

> Al least, in our democracies, you can decide the government with your vote.

and depending on hwere you are, you get bonus points added!

The "all government is evil" idea sounds ridiculous to me. Governments can be evil. Perhaps by their nature they will almost always do some evil. But evil in general, nah.

> Governments will always do evil.

> they are by nature evil.

These statements are not equivalent. It does not necessarily follow that doing a non-zero amount of evil means an institution, or type of institution, is by nature evil.

You could easily say the same thing about individuals or any grouping of people; individuals "always do evil", therefore all individuals are by their nature evil? It's true only in a trivial sense, in that humans and human-created groupings are imperfect and will do a mix of good and bad.

Curious how that is enforced as a copyright clause. I grasp how GPL and other copyleft licenses work when copies are distributed but can't see how a usage restriction can be applied unless the party is distributing the software.

It is very difficult to enforce any clause in any user agreement (or even in law) - as bad people will just ignore them.

My clause was a statement: Don't use my software - I did not make it for you.

The Microsoft employees wish to put restrictions in commercial contracts is interesting - and also scary. There are so many interest groups, and so many agendas, and so many views on whats right and whats wrong - that things could get really messed up.

In an interesting twist, your whole idea of using a license and copyright hinges on a government, the rule of law and the enforcement of said rule of law by a government. Which is in your eyes inherently evil. The software that the license applies to is distributed via the internet, a technology funded in large parts by the government, something inherently evil.

I agree that governments by their very nature will do evil things, but governments are not a single entity with a single mind controlling them, but rather a sprawling ecosystem of individual parts where some parts diverge from the party line, just to be checked and put back into place by other parts. Sometimes those checks fail and the whole thing goes downhill fast. In the general case, however, governments as a concept have enabled a society that is better off and capable of building infrastructure and things that an each man for his own kind of organization would never have been capable of.

Corporations are no less evil than governments. If anything, they may be more evil, as they are motivated solely by profit and have no particular reason to care about the population at large.

Why single out governments?

Perhaps GP is an anarchist and doesn't want governments or corporations.

No, I think both governments and corporations can be a good thing - if they behave ethically and the people all the way from the top to the ones carrying out policies - are accountable for their actions.

Example: If a border-patrol officer chose to follow orders and take an infant from her mother - because it's policy, he should be liable to criminal prosecution for breaking domestic and international law. Like any soldier in the field is. If a soldier choose to follow an illegal order and commit crimes against humanity, he risk prosecution. Police officers, migration officers, judges, prosecutors - they don't. And because of that, they do a lot of harm. Again, not all of the time, and not to everyone. But too often, and too much.

> I think both governments and corporations can be a good thing

> Governments will always do evil.

> they are by nature evil.

Please either make up your mind or use less misleading language in the future. You made a strong, controversial assertion, which then turned out to be a pretty mundane belief upon challenge.

Well, I think the wrong people will search power. Always. That means that governments, by nature, will be evil. They will always to some degree do evil.

However, if the people abusing their powers (by evil intent, neglect or pure stupidity) are held accountable, and removed, may be the governments can become something I can live with, even mostly good.

Today, I think the balance is very much that the governments are on the dark side. Some more than others (yes China - I'm looking at you), but noone that I know well inspires any good feelings. I would not work for any of them. Even paying taxes feels deeply immoral.

> Well, I think the wrong people will search power. Always. That means that governments, by nature, will be evil. They will always to some degree do evil.

Sure, but this is trivially true. Individuals will always to some degree do evil. Corporations will always to some degree do evil. Religions will always to some degree do evil. There are no possible groupings of humans that will not to some degree do evil.

> Today, I think the balance is very much that the governments are on the dark side.

An interesting observation, considering the proportion of (functional) democracies is higher than it has ever been. At what point in history were governments not on the "dark side"?

> Corporations are no less evil than governments. If anything, they may be more evil, as they are motivated solely by profit and have no particular reason to care about the population at large.

Corporations are accountable. They are accountable as entities, and as individuals (owners, managers, employees). If they do fatal decisions, the corporation may go bankrupt. If people act immoral, they may get fired. If they cheat, they may be caught and go to jail.

Corporations can also choose to act ethically - and, according to a recent Freakonomics podcast, actually benefit from that by attracting better employees :)

Meanwhile in the real world, many corporations get away with doing all these things, abusing labour, regulatory capture and the people running them get rich as Croesus doing it.

Yes. And often with support from the Government.

In USA, corruption is regulated by law... Politics is all about getting financial support and basically selling laws and policies to the highest bidder.

Meanwhile in the real world, many governments get away with doing all these things, and much worse, and more frequently, and they have armies and police.

> Corporations are accountable.

To shareholders, who are motivated by profit. Accountability is worse than useless if it holds you to account for the wrong things.

Governments are accountable to their populations, at least in democracies.

Unless there is crony-capitalism going on companies have to find voluntary buyers of their goods and services to generate revenue. Governments use force to generate revenue. It's that coercive behavior that elevates governments to the potential for more evil than a corporation.

Corporations absolutely rely on the public at large. More so than governments. You can choose to stop doing business with a corporation, and can stop giving them money. Can’t say the same about government. Yet you claim governments care more than corporations about “the population at large”?

Curious, why doesn’t your license also exclude regular companies? Many of them act as if they are above the law and destroy the environment while ignoring human rights. Are you ok with them using your software?

Actually, I prefer that only red-haired grandmothers with a life-long track-record of being nice, who enjoys Star Wars and Harry Potter, and have at least two pet dogs, to use my software.

However, making such narrow closes would be impractical and stupid. When I faced this dilemma, I was suffering severely from post traumatic stress - caused by abuse from the Norwegian government. The thought of giving my work to them - to any government - was literally painful. Therefore, I put in a clause to block out the bigger evil. Not for anyone who has ever beaten a puppy or pissed on a grave, or who happens to have the Wrong Religion or sexual orientation.

When it comes to immoral corporations - I vote with my money. And of course - I don't work there.

Governments are not evil by their nature. They are amoral, meaning they lack a moral sense, not immoral, meaning they are evil.

The same is true of companies and any other large group of people.

Amoral entities do things that moral entities consider evil, but it's because they have no moral sense, not because they are actively immoral.

Then we don't punish the supposedly moral beings in charge.

It's a great way to allow the evil to rule society.

There is a typo in the license text at the first instance of "source code", it is written "sorce".

Why do you trust people in business more than people in government?

Why not?

I was hoping for more than just an arbitrary reason, but how much can one really expect from a throwaway account?

Out of curiosity, wouldn't the gov just ignore the license if they really wanted to use it? Is anyone really going to stop them or even say something?

The government isn't an indivisible entity. It's made of lots and lots of people, bundled in very many departments. There's plenty of competition at both individual and department levels. Sure, at the very top, the President himself could just says "fuck it, we're using the software anyway". But most of the time, if someone in the government decided to ignore a license, they'd be risking their job (or possibly freedom).

Awesome. I've had the same idea but worried it wasn't feasible. Thank you for showing me there's precedent.

> SOFTWARE OR SORCE CODE

you have a typo in your copyright.

Couldn't they just reweite the code after leatving your solution?

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