That my work may be used for highly unethical purposes such as waging war is one reason that makes me think twice before releasing software.
There's definitely a cutoff point (if you're designing a nuclear-tipped rocket, there's usually just one reason for that) but stressing about whether or not the general-purpose software we create will be used for evil will only frustrate the cause of good.
What if your nuclear arms are never meant to actually be used, but the implicit threat of having that capability will keep your country from being bullied by other countries?
Not even nuclear weapons are entirely black-and-white.
A state arms itself with the most terrible weapons, and the best soliders, with that very idea in mind.
Nuclear weapons are nothing new, in that regard.
However - the existence of a weapon implies that it will be used, if the bluff fails.
Shorter: no such thing as a weapon not meant to be used. You just hope real hard they won't be.
On the other hand, say you had someone with a passion for rocketry and space, who found that the best way to pursue their dreams at the time was to build conventional bomb tipped rockets with slave labor...
Still not exactly black and white, but a good deal less fuzzy I think.
Playing chicken with the future of the whole world in order to gain a little bit of negotiating leverage? Pure evil.
Otherwise, a hardline faction in any government could have easily pushed for it. Not the mainstream political force in the USA, most probably. (Though, who really knows, looking at Vietnam.) Also, my understanding is that the USSR was in an echo chamber that led it to believe capitalist USA would collapse on itself (hence the "we will bury you" line), so probably they wouldn't have attacked neither. Though the USSR had clearly the edge in a ground war, and I'm sure plenty fanatics could have been found. So there was still that possibility.
Of course, the perfect solution would be a perfectly-balanced economic/political federation of countries, policed by a neutral organization. That couldn't happen then, and that won't happen in the future. Neither Western countries, nor China+Russia, nor specially Arabic countries, will submit to a UN decision that violates their core political tenets, be it justified or not.
We didn't fight the cold war over which side you butter your bread on.
I can't tell if you're complaining about the USSR or the USA...
Joking aside, I know the reasons the west fought the cold war, and I don't think they were justified.
What's not subjective is that war is (almost) always fought for the wrong reasons. As far as ethics, "Just War" is pretty ridiculous; that the highest officials in power think it's a good idea to murder people, but only in specific ways, is just a joke.
Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
But that is subjective.
That said, in (almost) whatever country you're in, there are people out there putting their lives at risk to defend your freedom. Sometimes they probably end up bullying people for no good reason (perhaps even over the course of years) and engaging in self-sacrificial operations, but that's not their _only_ function.
At which point it ceases to be considered "open source" software under the usual definitions. So you might as well just leave it closed source and refuse to sell licences to people you don't like.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://opensource.org/docs/osd#fields-of-endeavor (The OSI's open source definition is derived from Debian's Free Software Guidelines, which includes the same prohibition against licenses banning fields of endeavor).
For example, if your software doesn't meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines, then it won't be packaged in the main repos. And that has downstream impact on other distributions such as Ubuntu.
This really happened with nginx. A group of people in 2003 or so wouldn't use nginx because youporn used it.