Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

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Nobody cares about social responsibility, and you'll be hard-pressed to ever get anyone to genuinely care. Our "profession" has gone out of its way to establish new avenues in which copyright can be applied solely so we could "own" bits. Anyone releasing proprietary software is ignoring social responsibility.

Guess what? Nobody cares! Money is nice! It buys things! And Facebook gives its employees fascinating tasks and enjoyable work!

Nobody who works on software for a living, or is employed by a company largely based around software, has any right to judge any Facebook employees on the basis of "ignoring social responsibility," or not factoring in that people will feel the pain of their actions in an abstract future.

This profession systematically ruined a beautiful field and destroyed the potential it could have had to drastically help the human condition. We lost all right to talk about morality in 1969.

Who can honestly blame them? Who has the right to throw a stone, here?

> Who has the right to throw a stone, here?

- Those who build medical technology that saves lives.

- Those who make educational software that helps raise our young.

- Those who work on the digital support for real world infrastructure that delivers our food, supplies our electricity, and runs our transport.

- Those who work on software for publishing, arts and entertainments which underpin our entire modern culture.

Need I go on? Please don't conflate the ethics of a whole industry with the actions of a relatively few grubby little guttersnipes who make money from near monopolies exploiting other peoples vanity and isolation.

Medical software is primarily proprietary. They are contributing to the problem.

Educational software is almost exclusively for-profit and proprietary. They are contributing to many problems.

Digital support for infrastructure is overwhelmingly proprietary.

IBM may have started the terrible ethics of the software industry, but publishing, arts, and entertainment companies beat the horse until it couldn't move. They are the zenith of what's wrong in the industry.

I hear you, but think we are talking at cross purposes here because I am not making a Free Software argument. If we can factor out "proprietary is evil" for a moment then there's a world of difference between human activities that serve our mutual day-to-day needs and those that are parasitic upon our vices.

I don't see how this argument isn't roughly writing off the root of all of these problems in exchange for one of the symptoms.

> Nobody cares about social responsibility

I'm not gonna argue whether people must care about it or not. But saying that nobody does is simply not true and sounds like an attempt to excuse yourself. I know quite a lot of people who made career decisions which did not maximise their profit in favour of not doing things your conscience will torment you about.

Actually, it's just an attempt to accuse people writing lazy comments, not to excuse myself. I don't work on proprietary software.

People care they just can rationalize concerns away if the money’s good enough.

Money buys financial independence and time.

> Money buys financial independence and time.

Both of which are useless when the only place you have to spend them is a society no longer worth living in.

Some call it long term prudence. Round here we call it not shitting on your own doorstep.

> Money buys financial independence and time.

Hi Roman (from Chelsea). how are you?

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