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by jojobas 47 days ago
The distinction is if Mr. Kempf tried to charge all these people 1 dollar a year he would have gotten maybe a few million, and probably wouldn't have gotten much of the annual ~100 people to contribute to his product so the product wouldn't have been so awesome in the first place. There's just no money in being somewhat better than your OS's built-in player.

One can't be held responsible for unethical things done by his creation once it's sold.
2 comments
Dibby053 47 days ago
>One can't be held responsible for unethical things done by his creation once it's sold.

In a free market everybody can choose to sell or not, who to sell to and under which terms. Therefore, he should be held morally responsible for giving away control of his creation to the wrong people, or for not ensuring his creation can't be turned into something bad.

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jojobas 47 days ago
The founders typically don't get to choose, they have the obligation to respect minority investors' interests and sell to the highest bidder. Also the gold standard is going public, which would make figuring out who's "bad" pretty hard.

Then again, they don't get rich by cheating, abusing or whatever, they build a legal thing and sell it. You wouldn't go after a knife maker if someone used his knife to stab someone.

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Dibby053 47 days ago
If they don't get to choose, they already gave up control in an earlier stage. Just as with going public, they're relinquishing partial or total control of their company and this is a moral decision.

If you make a successful crowdsourced reviews website by building trust over time with contributors and users, and by any mechanism it ends up getting owned by an advertisement company that makes a business out of making it pay-to-win, should you not be held responsible?

I'm not talking about legal responsibility here, just moral responsibility. Ideally the former should follow the latter but it's not always the case.

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jojobas 47 days ago
You're making a case for stricter laws on dubious moral issues, not for startups as such.

Even then, has say Databricks or Canva been guilty of unethical conduct?

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robotpepi 47 days ago
people here focus too much on the numbers, the exact values, the details, and end up missing completely the point.
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