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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

If you went to an artist who takes commissions and they said "Here are the guidelines around the commissions I take" would you complain in the same way? Who cares if it's a bunch of engineers or an artist. If they have boundaries on what they want to create, that's their prerogative.

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Of course it's their prerogative, we can still talk about how they've limited some good options.

I think your analogy is poor, because this is a tool for makers. The engineers aren't the makers.

I think a more apt analogy is if John Deere made a universal harvester that you could use for any crop, but they decided they didn't like soybeans so you are forbidden to use it for that. In that case, yes I would complain, and I would expect everyone else to, as well.

I think there's an interesting parallel between your John Deere harvester and the Nvidia GPUs that can-but-restricts crypto mining, which people have, indeed, largely complained about.

To take that a step further, I wont code malware. I've never been asked but I'd refuse if I was. Everyone has their choices.

What if you were inventing a language (or a programming language)... If you decided to prevent people from saying things you disagreed (assuming you could work out the technical details of doing so) with would it be moral to do so? [edited for clarity]

There are programming projects[1] out there that use licenses to prevent people from using projects in ways the authors don't agree with. You could also argue that GPL does the same thing (prevents people from using/distributing the software in the way they would like).

Whether you consider it moral doesn't seem relevant, only to respect the wishes of the author of such programs.

[1] https://github.com/katharostech/bevy_retrograde/blob/master/...

As long as people can choose not to use the language, and I'm up front about the limitations, then yeah it seems fine. If I wrote a programming language that couldn't blow up the earth, I'm happy saying people need to find other tools if that's their goal. I'm under no obligation to build an earth blower upper for other people.

it's your language, do whatever you want. unless you're forcing others to use that language, there's zero moral issue. obviously you could come up with a number of what-ifs where this becomes some monopoly or the de facto standard, but that's not what this is.

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