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Comment by verve_rat | Hacker News Reader

I mean... no?

There is nothing compelling these organisations to use that particular piece of software. When contacted the author could just shrug and say "not my problem" and the organisation would just have to find some other software to use.

The author has no obligation to make things easier for people that don't know if they are doing evil or not, or if they are military or not.

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There's nothing compelling the author, no, except for in the situation outlined above they're really doing nothing to prevent military use, but they are hampering adoption among companies scrupulous or careful enough to not run afoul of a poorly defined legal term. Seems counter-productive to the apparent motives.

Only law abiding people follow the law too, what's the point of them?

Laws that are at least somewhat enforced can be good. Laws that are never enforced are counterproductive.

Depends, if the alternative is those laws are changed or removed from the statute books, their existence counterproductive for sure.

If the alternative is all the bad laws society regularly bends or ignores outright (suggesting there’s little or no democratic support for them) start being aggressively enforced, I’ll take never enforced every time.

In many societies there’s plenty of the latter.

There isn't even a law preventing direct military usage of that library as far as I understand, because they're not violating copyright law by just downloading something, which by the way is hosted using federal funds. But the absurdity of high energy physics / national nuclear research labs saying you can't use the software for military applications, and then this mainly comes up in civilian applications with nervous lawyers? Yeah it's missing the point more than you seem to be implying.

With something like this, the apparent motive is more likely to signal to other people his views on the military, more so than actually preventing them from using the software.

Can you be certain about that? Has anyone tried to test a no military use clause in court?

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