[potatolicious]

Sure, but I wasn't alive then, and the work I've done personally hasn't contributed to nuclear war or anything of that sort. Through my college years I had a couple of opportunities to work in the defense industry, but chose not to.

Which doesn't mean people aren't getting shot and blown up, it just means I'm not closely involved with it. My stance is not beating people over the head with morality, it's purely personal and self-centered. It helps me sleep better at night when I'm not building tools that directly spy on people. I'd like to be as many degrees removed from that as possible, really. Don't take my post to mean that I'm prescribing this morality onto others.

We could do a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon that proves that my work actually does lead to pain, death, and suffering throughout the world in a convoluted and indirect way, and it may in fact be true - but I don't think it's a stretch to say that there is a large moral difference between directly working on something with ill effects and being far removed from it with no intentional contribution.

Side note though: I don't buy this argument that we can't condemn things unless our hands our perfectly clean. The fact that we all are products of war, suffering, and other terrible things does not remove our ability to steer the ship forward.

[steveklabnik]

> the work I've done personally hasn't contributed to nuclear war or anything of that sort.

You might find this interesting: https://gist.github.com/zmaril/5326884

TL;DR: if you've contributed to open source in some way, you've probably given Palantir the tools they need to do their work.

[binarycrusader]

I don't agree with the post you're replying to, but your argument seems pretty specious to me.

Software developers are generally no more responsible for the misdeeds of others using their software than anyone else that produces almost any kind of tool.

[bernardlunn]

I agree, its "first do no harm" mantra