Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw2016 | Hacker News Reader

throw2016

There are people actively fighting the dehumanization and there are people building tools to dehumanize and defend their work. In a movie or artwork which side do you think are going to be portrayed as the 'good guys' and who are you going to be rooting for? That is cognitive dissonance.

This is just more evidence of how the lack of a moral compass has led the software community to not only sell out and build these creepy tools but worse defend surveillance and police state technologies without a hint of self awareness in these kind of discussions.

Without push back and dissent it's only a matter of time the software community is completely tainted with collusion as a group of opportunists with zero ethics by the general public like those collaborating with authoritarian police states against the people.

View on HN

> This is just more evidence of how the lack of a moral compass has led the software community to not only sell out and build these creepy tools but worse actually defend surveillance and police state technologies without a hint of self awareness in these kind of discussions.

I'd only add that there's certainly a small part of the community that realizes this, in fact the free software movement is also about ethics, however the kind of developers who are aware are usually not your usual Valley types.

I'm not 100% sure that the ethics of the free software movement have a single solitary thing to do with, say, objecting to the sorts of things Palantir's clients get up to. Speaking from experience, F/OSS provides very little control over end user behavior; you can turn down a 'evil' client if you are proprietary but not if you are F/OSS. Not a dig against F/OSS, just a statement that their ethics don't really address these concerns (I'm sure they would have arguments that a greater good is served, etc.)

Sure, but I'd differentiate somewhat between "open-source software", (i.e. ESR) and "free software" i.e. RMS. Which is why I did not use FOSS, but free-software explicitly. Maybe it's even better to narrow it down to copyleft only.

Open-source is not at all concerned with what's ethical. It's free-software made corporate-friendly. Free software certainly is a bit different, if you for example look at the sort of campaigns the Free Software Foundation advocates for, there's a lot of political campaigning that has to do with ethics.

You cannot reasonably restrict software for 'no evil use' as that definition is subjective and open to abuse, but the FSF is definitely more concerned with software ethics than the OSI.

Yes, but neither group seems to regard "oh geez, my Kalman filter code is being used to build baby-killing rocket drones" as part of the range of ethical questions that software licensing might cover. I'm not saying that either group on the free/open source software spectrum should be engaging with this issue or that it would be helpful if they did ("Apache License Variant Number 57, No Babykilling Plz!") but one of the aspects of free or open source software is that you have pretty much zero ability to stop what some folks might consider highly unethical or immoral uses of one's software.

Also, "no evil use" restrictions are subjective, but so what? You could be quite specific here ("no military use", "no surveillance use"). Choosing not to engage here is itself a decision with moral and ethical components (I'm not sure I disagree with it).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com