On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 9:06 PM, Tom Morris <tom(a)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.
--
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Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]