> Ada Ehmke went on to argue that open source developers cannot ignore their social responsibilities. "I believe that as technologists we have a moral imperative to prevent our work from being used to harm others," she said.
A tired trick - if you don't share the view someone is pushing, you're "ignoring responsibility". But FOSS isn't ignoring anything - it merely prioritizes different values, and does not wish to imperil them to serve values Ada Ehmke prefers.
Because adding those proposed conditions, even before they're inflated to included everyone's pet cause of the day, creates legal peril for end users, especially if they don't have a team of lawyers on retainer. It doesn't matter if you're technically allowed to use some code, if proving it would bankrupt you.
That's ignoring the fact that it would be challenging to even come up with a set of uses that everyone agrees are prohibited. E.g. for the example given at the end of the article, Chinese coders would probably see it as assuring they don't get attacked by virtue of MAD. Pretty soon, software would balkanize according to geopolitics, instead of uplifting everyone. It's worth pointing out this would harm smaller countries more, due to economies of scale. It's surprising a champion of the oppressed such as Ehmke does not realize this.
> She's put that belief to work in a set of ethical licenses that resemble conventional open source licenses but add restrictions on activities such as acts of war or "surveilling or tracking individuals for financial gain."
There is nothing ethical about these "ethical" licenses. If open source allowed restrictions on who could use it, we'd end up in a dystopia of "only registered Democrats can use software A, B, and C, and only registered Republicans can use software X, Y, and Z" in no time.
A tired trick - if you don't share the view someone is pushing, you're "ignoring responsibility". But FOSS isn't ignoring anything - it merely prioritizes different values, and does not wish to imperil them to serve values Ada Ehmke prefers.
Because adding those proposed conditions, even before they're inflated to included everyone's pet cause of the day, creates legal peril for end users, especially if they don't have a team of lawyers on retainer. It doesn't matter if you're technically allowed to use some code, if proving it would bankrupt you.
That's ignoring the fact that it would be challenging to even come up with a set of uses that everyone agrees are prohibited. E.g. for the example given at the end of the article, Chinese coders would probably see it as assuring they don't get attacked by virtue of MAD. Pretty soon, software would balkanize according to geopolitics, instead of uplifting everyone. It's worth pointing out this would harm smaller countries more, due to economies of scale. It's surprising a champion of the oppressed such as Ehmke does not realize this.