On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 9:06 PM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
I was drawing an analogy: the point I was making is very simple - the general principle of "we shouldn't do X because someone else might reuse it for bad thing Y" is a pretty lousy argument, given that we do quite a lot of things in the free culture/open source software world that have the same problem. Should the developers of Hadoop worry that (your repressive regime of choice) might use their tools to more efficiently sort through surveillance data of their citizens?
If you were interested in making a well formed analogy, you might go about it by thinking about what would be the reaction if the streetmaps google makes began to be tagged in such a fashion that people could plan their routes so they wouldn't have to look advertising billboards which had risque themes, such as lingerie advertisements or perfume advertisements or they could plan their route so they wouldn't have to pass through neighbourhoods where certain ethnic groups live, while travelling. The reason that will never happen of course, is because Google has this principle of not being evil, which the WMF could usefully emulate.