Despite what seems like quite a lot of political overlap with the author I have to disagree with basically the entire article.
It approaches the problem from entirely the wrong end. Code is code and we shouldn't be adding ever more licenses and conditions to it.
Besides the definition of 'evil' is a purely political one. While ICE is a good example, what about Cuba? Many people would claim Cuba is a despotic terrible regime (I wouldn't agree) and US sanctions already stop certain goods and services being provided to Cuba. What about a research department in Iran using code to predict earthquakes? What about here in the UK, the department of work and pensions (DWP) is undergoing a huge IT overhaul, my belief is their current incarnation is borderline fascist and anyone working with them is committing social murder, but it's not clear cut.
But these aren't code's problems to solve. They're ours,they're for politics to solve and that's a messy process that shouldn't interfere with a movement to build a commons of knowledge in the form of code. The same with Amazon or whoever profiting without giving back. I believe, as do many others, that the wealth of people like Jeff Bezos is obscene and unjustifiable (many others, especially here feel opposite). But trying to thrash out these issues through code licenses is just absurd.
While I'm all for things like codes of conduct to improve conditions on open source projects the reasons given here for putting up fences around the 'commons' of open source just seem wrongheaded.
As a final example take decentralised technologies. A lot of actual usage is by people who don't want to be monitored for more nefarious reasons (human trafficking, csa etc) (alongside/counter-to genuinely positive usages like whistle blowing, evading censorship, etc) but that's not a flaw with the technology, we have social structures to deal with that sort of thing.
>"As software engineers, we have to abide by some sort of moral compass," Vargo told The Register at the time. "When I learned that my code was being used for purposes that I perceive as evil, I had to act."
The key here is "purposes that I perceive as evil". The list of those purposes knows no bounds, and will extend to as far as the developer deems so. Organizations should keep this mind the next time they want to use open-source software -- does our use-case sit in line with whatever the maintainers/developers' moods are that day?
Submitted with the hope that it can be discussed without too much vitriol, although honestly I'm not expecting it to last very long.
We don't get a lot of content from the viewpoint proponents of things like the "ethical source license" (A license that explicitly prevents groups like ICE from using the code). I don't think this article was written with the intention of being divisive, and I'd hope it could offer some insight into the mind-set of that particular sub-culture.
Nice arguments you provided. Are you part of the Marxist subversion web that is trying to shove "Code of Conduct" political witch-hunt tools into the software world?
Trying to follow Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch's vision of controlling every aspect of human life?
There isn’t any response to your point that can’t easily be deflected as being in “bad faith” because your own argument is an emotional appeal. Your position is that the people you despise are so bad that their code is itself tainted to the extent that even running it runs the risk of… genocide or something?
In order to achieve a purity in your view would require a line-by-line political Bill Of Materials that includes the political beliefs at the time of the coders at time of each commit. It is nonsensical.
Look, I was born, raised and spent most of my life in the country government of which considered themselves the one and only source of what is good and what is bad for 70 years. Actively punishing people for disobedience for "greater good". This great experiment came at the price of just a few tens of millions dead people, besides other things. And it didn't end well - country, being one of the superpowers of the world, basically disappeared overnight.
Since then, when I hear "greater good" I feel an urge to kill (only half joking here). And "requiring the source code" sounds pretty much like "greater good" for me. If I'm releasing the code, then I'm releasing it. If I think that some asshole, who invented the best smartphone on the planet, will use it for his own profit and if I feel pain thinking so, I'm not going to release it.
Releasing source code and attaching a piece of political agenda to is is not a coding activity, it's a specific kind of political activity - a political propaganda. "When I hear the word propaganda I'm reaching for the gun".
Your own viewpoint is pretty biased too Drew. Your entire software philosophy is based on your own model of ethics and admitting that the software megacorps might not be the very epitome of evil would invalidate most of the reasons for the existence of sourcehut and your other projects.
I hope you continue to explore other places in the design space, but calling people evil because you disagree with them makes people disengage. It makes you look like just another zealot screaming his viewpoint into the uncaring masses.
>Github refuses to work with ICE today and hypothetically tomorrow will only host code for Democrats?
I don't believe that political organisations are considered a protected class so yes, GitHub could decide to only host code for Democrats.
Your point seems to be "This is a slippery slope. Where do we draw the line?"
I think it is entirely reasonable that there _should_ be a line.
To take your example to the disturbing extreme, consider this: "Github refuses to work with ICE today and hypothetically tomorrow will refuse to build crematoria in extermination camps?"
There must be a line _somewhere_. Finding the best place to draw that line is a major challenge that requires significant and likely fraught discussion but it is something that must be done.
1 point by sbr464 3 minutes ago | parent | edit | delete [-] | on: Lerna adds clause to MIT license blocking certain ...
I respect their decision and rights, but I don't really understand this move. I also believe this sets a dangerous potential pattern within the developer community.
I personally don't agree with certain statements/immigration/ICE etc. but I'm more put back by this.
Coding is becoming easier and will increasingly include more of the general population (which is a good thing). This means it's about to become much more diverse in regards to religion, political beliefs, personal morals, citizenship, etc.
I don't mean this in the political/philosophical sense. I mean soon people will start showing up in Github/twitter comments, contributing pull requests, with a genuine interest about coding, who look like people you personally dislike. Maybe they are wearing a Trump t-shirt in their profile photo, but their code is great. Are you going to reject their pull request or ignore their comments?
Governments & company policies change frequently. There's also an unlimited combination of potential beliefs, moral stances, crimes by an unlimited number of people and companies. At what point would you decide to add or remove amendments to your license?
I also feel it's hypocritical to use a product owned by Microsoft (github), while calling them out in your license by name. I mean, are you protesting Microsoft or aren't you?
How do you know that an upstream dependency you are benefitting from wasn't created by one of these companies?
To highlight the humor of this line of thinking, why not block oppressive regimes, serial killers (>= 6 people, <6 are ok), certain religious groups with worse principals than ICE?
It's perfectly ethical to write open source code that will crash a passenger jet
Really?
We’re not talking about bugs here, we’re talking about the deliberate inclusion of dangerous logic traps based on assumptions that could be wrong.
In engineering terms, this is trying to solve the problem at the wrong level of abstraction. Maybe you don’t like the thought of your code being used in weapons; that’s perfectly reasonable. Maybe you want to rid the world of such weapons; also reasonable. My advice would be that open source is not the right model in those circumstances, and that to really solve the problem you’ll have to be politically engaged.
Littering code with booby traps and publishing it is an absolutely awful idea, one that should not be acceptable to us as a professional community.
I agree that some choices cannot be avoided, but others can and should be avoided.
In my opinion, we should avoid linking the use of IT infrastructures to political issues such as systems of government, wars, climate change, gender identity, religion or anything else that is unrelated to the technical aspects of that infrastructure.
Open source licences themselves are a good example of how I think it should be done. They do not impose any unnecessary political restrictions. They only impose specific rules related to source code. I think that's a good idea and we should apply this idea to other IT infrastructures as well.
The moral argument that code should not be restrained by artificial license, like we treat ideas, is a strong one but not made clearly here.
If code was treated more like ideas or recipes we'd all still have jobs.
If you believe that strongly enough, civil disobedience through ignoring licenses is one approach. No one should risk more than they're willing to lose on the position because you will lose if it's costing someone else enough.
That’s a feature, which rhymes with the author’s argument: that there are politics and that people decide norms, and whether or not you agree with the decisions, having immutable code just go ahead and enforce/permit/control whatever is a dystopia that we should not want.
My experience says that codes of conduct are written with the express desire of keeping all open source communities left-leaning.
I've talked to many people about the matter and some of them say that open source is supposed to be left-leaning, and that those are its principles. That ignores that right-leaning users should also be able to benefit from open source values (privacy, for example) and contribute code, and that not everybody who uses open source has to be a supporter of the open source principles (for example, I use an open source browser because it's the best, not because I like open source better than closed source).
It's a good start. But there are other problematic institutions in the US.
No developer should accept theirs code being used by the racist Police or by the Army.
And if you truly want to change things, you should strive towards supporting the dismantling of American capitalism and ending its global hegemony, so no code use by banks or finance companies either.
We didn’t “hate” proprietary code (it often came off that way, I’ll admit). We did think it was morally wrong to make money off it. We thought it was like patenting the Pythagorean theorem.
So really, you think “building things in general” required . . . what? Calm acceptance of restrictive licensing and software patents? Or maybe we should have been nicer about it? Again, it’s like “building things” must be properly done the way we currently do it. With lots of lawyers and lots of EULAs.
This strikes me as a profoundly conservative position. How rude those Jacobins were! If only they were more polite. If only they had recognized that we live in the best of all possible worlds . . .
Gotta say, this scenario you're so intricately weaving doesn't sound like any open source project I've ever come across. I guess I'll continue playing. At this point it would depend on how many people agreed with you that the policy itself is rooted in bigotry. If it's just you, then this new accusation is going to sound pretty silly.
I guess you're trying to pull an example from history. I don't doubt that authoritarian regimes can get accusatory, and nonsense can spiral. But we're not talking about authoritarian regimes, we're talking about open source software projects. I don't buy that they're at all similar enough to make this kind of connection.
This is usually where the politics begin. The code is objectively bad, but depending on your relationship with the owners of the startup, they may or may not tolerate your opinion.
Later, when the code starts causing things to break, you may be totally or partially blamed. I would have a private discussion with the person you trust most at the company about how to institute a formal code review process where things are as objective and risk-free as possible
It approaches the problem from entirely the wrong end. Code is code and we shouldn't be adding ever more licenses and conditions to it.
Besides the definition of 'evil' is a purely political one. While ICE is a good example, what about Cuba? Many people would claim Cuba is a despotic terrible regime (I wouldn't agree) and US sanctions already stop certain goods and services being provided to Cuba. What about a research department in Iran using code to predict earthquakes? What about here in the UK, the department of work and pensions (DWP) is undergoing a huge IT overhaul, my belief is their current incarnation is borderline fascist and anyone working with them is committing social murder, but it's not clear cut.
But these aren't code's problems to solve. They're ours,they're for politics to solve and that's a messy process that shouldn't interfere with a movement to build a commons of knowledge in the form of code. The same with Amazon or whoever profiting without giving back. I believe, as do many others, that the wealth of people like Jeff Bezos is obscene and unjustifiable (many others, especially here feel opposite). But trying to thrash out these issues through code licenses is just absurd.
While I'm all for things like codes of conduct to improve conditions on open source projects the reasons given here for putting up fences around the 'commons' of open source just seem wrongheaded.
As a final example take decentralised technologies. A lot of actual usage is by people who don't want to be monitored for more nefarious reasons (human trafficking, csa etc) (alongside/counter-to genuinely positive usages like whistle blowing, evading censorship, etc) but that's not a flaw with the technology, we have social structures to deal with that sort of thing.
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