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Comment by voodoochilo | Hacker News Reader

i know this all-or-nothing-argument and yes it is correct. it's about purity of the idea of free software, but killing humans is not pure. so how can the idea stay pure therefore?

and what do i tell my grandchildren if the ask me one day: "grandpa, why exactly did you write that big while-switch-statement which killed 6.000.000 people in 2016?"

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"I didn't write it so that 6 million people would be killed, nor did i write it for those people to use specifically. I wrote it to make people's lives easier and to advance human knowledge. I wrote it to create a tool that other could use. Like how people use a hammer. And just like a hammer, while most people used it how it was intended, some people used it to kill other people or to destroy things. Despite that, though, we don't ban hammers and stop making them.

Yes, some people used my code badly, and did horrible things with it, but others used it in spaceships and self driving cars. Ultimately what I made was a tool, and once something like code or an idea or a design is given to the world and the world sees how good it is, there is no way to restrict who uses it or how they use it.

My code is not inherently evil, nor is it inherently good. It just is. Others can use it to do good or to do bad, but at the end of the day, they are just using a tool to multiply the effects of their actions."

well, i sleept on that and came to the point that this problem is similar to the knife-problem: you can use a knife to butter your bread or to cut someone into little pieces - but that's not the knife's fault or the fault of the guy who made the knife or the guy who invented the concept of the knife.

therefore rms and you other smart bastards;) were right - i was wrong.

err, why would you write a switch statement that kills all those people?

'Twas a bug; too lazy to write unit tests.

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