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Comment by aculver | Hacker News Reader

The content of the post was not at all what I expected.

The funny thing about principles is they're easy to have when they're not being tested. For example:

"'I really don’t want this guy’s money,' Tyler said at one point. We’re glad not to have it."

That's a lot easier to say when the offer of money is no longer on the table. I'm not sure at what point that was actually said, but in the article it comes after giving this guy a demo of the system, making genuine recommendations about his entire process, and doing actual customization work for the guy.

Patent trolling aside, using the law of the land to justify going against your personal conscience is a horrible idea.

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> using the law of the land to justify going against your personal conscience

I don't see it that way at all. Their personal consciences recoiled at providing support for a patent troll and they recoiled at imposing censorship based on the content of a client's messages. They had to reconcile these two opposing attacks of conscience.

Refusing a service to someone you don't like, for whatever reason, is not censorship, so there is no conflict of ethics.

The line is less clear when the company is in a position of great power (e.g. Google in search, Apple in smartphones) but it's clear that e.g. restaurant can have a dress code (which is frivolous) and refuse service if you don't comply with that dress code and an insignificant crm business can refuse you service for any reason whatsoever. It's not censorship because there's another restaurant just around the corner and another crm product a click away.

The article is framed as some epic battle of ethics but all I get from it is that $10/month is deciding factor in their decisions. They don't want the money from patent trolls but they'll take it if given.

I think the difference with the restaurant analogy is that the dress code is applied before you enter and are seated. Thus you'll be turned away outright for dressing improperly.

Compare it to this, where the issue only arose because the customer made clear their intention well after signing up.

I'm seeing the main issue here being that enforcing their own ideals, so they don't serve the customers they want, involves waiting for the to contact support, lest they violate their own ethics re: privacy and data protection.

How many new customers will they get when they earn a reputation of applying a personal and undisclosed set of ethics and ideals to customers any time after they sign up?

I disagree. It IS censorship to prevent someone from using your service to distribute their message. It is not GOVERNMENT censorship. Censorship engaged in voluntarily is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is there a legally protected right to use someone else's service to distribute your message. But in this case LessAnnoying had a value of their own (not legally mandated) of allowing anyone to use their service regardless of content. They used Apple's AppStore as an example of the kind of behavior they did NOT want to engage in.

This internal desire not to refuse service based on the content of the message came into conflict with their desire not to assist patent trolls. They chose to value the former over the latter.

I was expecting a punchline such as, "The troll, on seeing the implementation of our feature set has notified our lawyers that we are infringing on his patent"

To be clear, we tell customers all the time that they shouldn't use our software. Each customer is worth $10/month, so it's not worth having people on the system that don't belong. This wasn't about the money at all, it was about the precedent it would set. How do we convince our other users that they can trust us if we're arbitrarily booting users because we disagree with them.

They would start trusting you on your principals, if they didn't agree and you lost a customer, then it's a customer that didn't line up with what you as a person line up with, and therefore you shouldn't be worried about them.

Edit: Didn't really wrap up my final thought.

It's a really scary precedent to say that you can only use software if the software vendor's morals are compatible with your own morals.

Thought experiment: If the guys running Less Annoying CRM are strong atheists (note: I have no idea what their religious beliefs are), and this post was about whether or not they'd provide support for a devoutly christian customer, what would the reaction be? Would you still think it's ok for them to boot the customer because their principles don't mesh with their customer's?

Yes.

Just don't complain when all the religious customers go away.

What if it's a physical storefront? Would you be ok with, say, an ice cream parlor run by christians that put up a sign saying atheists are not welcome?

Note, this actually happened, and people were outraged. http://freethinker.co.uk/2011/11/23/missouri-ice-cream-shop-...

Again, yeah that would be fine with me, I'd go to a different ice cream parlor.

Another thing to consider, this guy that banned athiests, why not ban ALL other religions? Seems a bit hypocritical, but still, it's up to him.

(Yes I'm aware that religious discrimination is illegal.)

Within the confines of this argument, it would depend on if the creators disagreed with the fundamental morals Christianity, or if they merely disagreed with the principles practiced by this specific branch of the religion. There can be a world of difference between The Church and a church, and that aside, it's illegal (in the US) to discriminate based on religion. It's not illegal to discriminate based on the actions of a group, religious or not.

Could you explicitly turn away all Christians? No. Could you turn away the Westboro Baptist Church? Yes. Morals are defined inside the law if you want to stay in business for very long.

As you've seen from the article, this is not "scary" in any way because most businesses will go for the money over compatibility with their moral views.

Also, advocating or even practicing exclusivity is not a precedent as it has been going on for centuries, in thousands of different forms.

Some of those most people disagree (e.g. there was a time a black man would not be served in many restaurants) and some of those people accept as completely valid (e.g. I'm sure there are many country clubs I'm not eligible to join).

It's scary precisely because software is different than physical establishments. If I frequent a restaurant, but one day they decide to impose their moral values and kick me out, I can always go somewhere else. But if I build my business on top of some vendor's platform, and then one day they decide to impose their moral values and kick me off, now my business is screwed.

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