thank you for pointing this out! i probably would not have bothered to click through if i hadn't seen this comment, and i would have missed a well-articulated stance on an issue i think about every time i pick a license: whether or not freely sharing my work will have a net positive effect on the world.
on contradiction is an apt choice of essay to look to here.
i wasn't going to speak on twenty enemies because i haven't read it before, but after reading five pages or so i went back to a section that had stuck with me only to discover it was the same one the author had pulled as the first quotation. not exactly where i would have expected to stumble across this, but here we are. again, thank for you calling out that this was more than the milquetoast drivel i had assumed it to be from an uncharitable reading of the title alone.
Likewise - at first I was prepared for this to be another weird permutation of MIT/BSD or something but once I got further into the article I understood the author's point (and agreed!) about claiming (at least a symbolic) right of refusal to allow one's work to be used for ill.
I don't know how enforceable that becomes, and I know that people the author refers to as dogmatists may be quick to point out the flaws (on some level it reminds me of pharmacists who refuse to dispense medications on personal grounds - eg, contraceptives or diabetic supplies to people they suspect of drug use).
But I think the conversation is valuable - there is a moral/ethical dilemma for many of us who truly love computing, when faced with a job market that consists largely of For-Profit Corporations And Governments Doing Bad Things (obviously this is personal and relative).
Mr Crockford has trolled the entire industry with the JSON license: https://www.json.org/license.html It states that it can be used for good, but not for evil.
The problem is, of course, in the lack of an established, clear-cut, whole-society consensus on what is good and what is evil, and also in the inability of humans to formally define even their own criteria for that. As with porn, "I can recognize it when I see it" is a bit shaky ground for legal matters.
Speaking of the For-Profit Corporations, the profit is what pays the wages of those they employ, so, unless you agree to do programming (or any professional activity) entirely as a pastime,..
The revenue is what pays the wages. Wages are a business expense, not an optional benefit. I don’t like this response. It comes across as very “but you use a cell phone” to me. Yes, the world we live in is fueled by profit. It’s not a good thing to me.
on contradiction is an apt choice of essay to look to here.
i wasn't going to speak on twenty enemies because i haven't read it before, but after reading five pages or so i went back to a section that had stuck with me only to discover it was the same one the author had pulled as the first quotation. not exactly where i would have expected to stumble across this, but here we are. again, thank for you calling out that this was more than the milquetoast drivel i had assumed it to be from an uncharitable reading of the title alone.