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Comment by PhaseLockk | Hacker News Reader

> You could (and perhaps should) take the opinion that one should care about security, but there is no obligation (legal, financial, or moral) that requires an open source maintainer to care about anything.

I was taught that part of being an engineer taking a moral responsibility for the safety of your creations. I know that the field has changed quite a bit, and that people in open source come from many different backgrounds. But I think it's reasonable to hold as an ideal that there is a moral responsibility to at least make sure people using your stuff understand what they are getting into. And that such a moral responsibility would require more than disclaiming liability.

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I don't think these are contradictory positions. It's a bit like defensive programming in social space: one can take significant responsibility for one's own work while remaining aware that others with no legal/etc compulsion to likely will not.

> I was taught that part of being an engineer taking a moral responsibility for the safety of your creations.

almost certainly in the framework of being employed or contracted to do engineering work. go back and ask your teachers what they felt they owe people asking them to design things unpaid, in their free time.

If I build something in real life, like a playground, and ask people to come use it, but then through my own negligence it falls apart and becomes a hazard, it is my fault for having created this situation in the first place.

Idk why this keeps getting tied back to paid/unpaid. I can think of many a situation where someone gets paid, and also doesn't care at all to help.

> Idk why this keeps getting tied back to paid/unpaid

i was responding to a comment about engineering ethics. engineering is a profession. engineering ethics is taught to student engineers in the context of a job, where you're getting paid. taking the (literal classroom) lessons out of context distorts them.

if you go back to your engineering ethics professors and say "gee, but what if i do this work for fun and just stick it up on a web page on the internet", they're going to look at you like you're insane, and then not know what to say.

> If I build something in real life

the last thing this thread needs is more analogies.

> go back and ask your teachers what they felt they owe people asking them to design things unpaid, in their free time

As an engineer, your first duty is to protect the public, then your client, then your employer. You have that duty to the public regardless of whether you're being paid by a client or not, because it comes from practicing engineering, not from remuneration.

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