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Comment by dev_dull | Hacker News Reader

If you contribute to open source software then you’re contributing to military projects.

Contributing to something which could be used by the military is different to contributing to something which will be used by the military specifically.

IMO this is the correct answer.

That’s the standard argument, and yes, it’s true. There’s a difference between actively working on a defined project and putting some stuff out into the open though, and that at least for me is a reasonable border.

To me this is a non-trivial distinction.

Especially with dual-use technology, e.g. open source infrastructure, open accessibility moots some qualms about empowering a specific military at the expense of others.

(On the other hand, in terms of wars not happening and pure global peace and stability, there are arguments for elevating between 1 and 5 powers above others)

If you're paying taxes you're also contributing to military projects. There is a difference between working on a weapons system and working on an operating system that can also be used in weapons.

So this person shouldn't have any quandaries working on military projects, because they might have contributed a bugfix to some code in libcurl or some other library that is used somewhere in the vast US military? Seems like an awfully weak argument.

God dammit, I knew my open source game framework was going to be used for nefarious purposes, how could I have been so short sighted?

You maybe joking but military loves them some games for training purposes. So ironically enough having a nice gaming platform actually gives you good chances of contributing (unwittingly) to military projects.

That's a good point!

And if you contribute to science, you're contributing to military projects.

If you've taught kindergarten or middle school, you've probably helped raise a soldier.

Yeah ok.

> If you've taught kindergarten or middle school, you've probably helped raise a soldier.

I believe that on HN you perhaps talk to the wrong audience for this argument. If the teacher really had the "hacker spirit" in teaching, the pupils will be too freethinking (as in hacker) to be suitable soldiers.

Ah, HackerNews' other greatest sin

"If someone's freethinking, they'll think exactly like me"

> "If someone's freethinking, they'll think exactly like me"

I claim that my point nevertheless stands. I was explicitly talking about "hacker spirit". If you read up on the hacker ethics

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hacker_ethic&oldi...

you will find many points that will make such a person a really unsuitable soldier, for example "Mistrust authority — promote decentralization", which is at least in my worldview quite the opposite of the life as a soldier, where obedience, chain of command etc. are central.

The same holds for "All information should be free", which is quite in the spirit of Snowden and Assange, but quite the opposite of the values of being a soldier, where military secrets are (for good or bad) of importance.

>If the teacher really had the "hacker spirit" in teaching, the pupils will be too freethinking

This is the comment I was shooting at. I don't believe this. Instead I believe something far more terrifying.

"Society manages complexity by the occasional cull of the free thinker"

Lots of smart people can bring a lot of good change to a society and culture, but one needs to be very careful to think the majority of the population in that society will accept those changes, and the faster they occur, the more resentment builds. Suddenly you have politicians and activists pining for the 'good old days'. Suddenly a nice authoritarian figure pops up and tells the masses that he can fix all their problems. There are ample examples in history to see where this leads.

That damn Newton and his laws....mass murdering bastard that enabled all kinds of weapons to be developed. And ol' baby-killer Franklin should have never flown that damned kite of his either... some people, i'll tell ya' what...

A side-effect, rather than the primary goal. There is a not-so-subtle difference.

Because the GPL (and other such) is a license, that can apparently have almost arbitrary restrictions, can there exist a NMPL -- non-military public license -- that excludes military use? For a current and real example, much commercial software is licensed under terms that exclude use in nuclear or lifesaving critical applications.

I'm not sure how one enforces such a license. Let's be real, even a successful lawsuit isn't going to remove said software from the military's hands. And to the extent it is honored, it has the negative effect of driving up the cost of developing military software, which of course comes out normal people's pockets.

But it might be an interesting way to take up a principled stance.

Also, to world peace. And crime. And law enforcement. And... humanity.

Yes, until people understand the nature of duality, they struggle with simple concepts. If I choose to not protect myself , am I enabling murders and evil to flourish? Life and death, peace and war, these things are necessary for the engine of reality to continue to cycle. Living itself is a fight against death- would you deny death it due?

If you are in Oil industry you are helping military projects. Irrelevant because 99% of the use for that activity is non-military. In such cases military has million options if you refuse.

I'm not quite sure why this is downvoted, although I understand the nuance, it seems an interesting and related point.

Out of interest, are there open source licenses that prevent use in military projects? ISTR reading something recently about it being legally questionable to discriminate between who can accept a license, but that was in the context of allowing open source for non-commercial purposes.

Crockford’s original JSON licence banned the use of the technology for evil, but IBM’s lawyers knew that a bunch of their projects couldn’t be guaranteed to be 100% evil-free and negotiated an exemption.

By definition, a license that has Field of Use restrictions is not an Open Source license.

Creative Commons NonCommercial licenses, for example, are neither Open Source nor Free Software licenses.

I imagine that someone who wants to prevent use of their work by the military would not be concerned over whether something is technically not open source or not.

I don't think the idea of free software and banning specific uses is compatible. OSI also says that they require no such discrimination: https://opensource.org/osd (points 5, 6)

> Out of interest, are there open source licenses that prevent use in military projects?

This question is an oxymoron.

Both the definition of open source (by the Open Source Initiative) and the definition of free software (by the Free Software Foundation) explicitly forbid discriminating against any person or a group of people for software to be considered as open source / free software.

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