| 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. |
Why not, call it Code of Conduct part 2, place it right after Diversity Statement and the definition Feelings then ban everyone who disagrees with your view on what evil is. And soon no one will be able to use EVIL mode on Emacs anymore /s