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Posted Oct 25, 2024 11:05 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341)In reply to: Related links by dgn
Parent article: Several Russian developers lose kernel maintainership status
1. I see value in holding people responsible for the choices to make, including who they work for and the impact of that work on the world.
2. I see that the world is incredibly shitty place, and (ignoring the issue of dual-use technologies - you may work on something for its positive uses, but you can't control the negative uses) so much work these days is via very large corporates, with many interconnections, that you almost can not avoid working for corporates with connections to pretty shitty other corporates.
No doubt stuff I have worked on has been used for things that a number of people would consider "bad" or even "evil". E.g., I have done contracting to fix issues and improve networking software - many uses - but I did that work for a company in the oil industry, and their aim was to more efficiently find more oil for us to burn. Etc.
3. I see a lot of hypocrisy. Really, we just have different "tribes", each aligned around a few different "great powers". Each of which is guilty of great evil around the world. Each claims moral superiority, and decries the evil of the others. And the circus continues and continues, while the bodies of children pile up. The children I killed are all unfortunate accidents, collateral damage, and ultimately the responsibility of the evil terrorists who forced me to bomb children. The children /you/ killed are proof of your utter depravity.
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On "Somebody's got to build rockets and bombs, that's sadly the way it is." - well, in a world where the M-I-complex was being deployed for defensive purposes, ok, you can easily justify that morally. In a world where, for many decades now, the output of that complex is primarily used by the richest and most developed nations in the world to kill poor people in underdeveloped countries in vast numbers, for the ultimate aim of gaining control (directly or less directly by installing a more sympathetic gov) of their resources, such work is... a lot more questionable. The western "rules based order" has completely lost its moral compass since WWII, in my opinion, your opinion may differ.
The reference to Meta was not about an association to Lockheed-Martin. There are credible allegations that Meta has been providing meta-data from WhatsApp to the IDF, which the IDF then uses for targeting.
But... not really for LWN. Ping me and meet me in Dublin for a pint, for anyone who wants to debate this further.