> perhaps it's time we wrote restrictions into licenses to prevent this tech from being used for such evil purposes.

Such software would no longer be open source (canonically defined by OSI) or free (canonically defined by the FSF), and it would cause all sorts of problems for developers as it would be incompatible with other licenses such as the GPL. And it would be impossible to somehow enumerate all "evil purposes" in a licenses, and if you theoretically did, virtually everyone else would disagree with at least some part of it.

I see this attitude a lot on HN, something along the lines of "the social problems created by this new/hypothetical technology would be hard to solve, so let's not bother trying". But as the current social media regulation fracas shows, if technologists are unwilling to engage with broader society to address the problems they create, solutions will be imposed upon them by politicians who are probably less informed about which measures are or aren't effective.

We're willing to devote a lot of time and effort to solving hard technical problems, we should be at least as willing to use some of that energy to solve the associated social problems as well.

> We're willing to devote a lot of time and effort to solving hard technical problems, we should be at least as willing to use some of that energy to solve the associated social problems as well.

Here's the thing: technological expertise in no way implies social expertise. In fact anecdotally they are inversely correlated. Technologists would benefit from moving in the humility direction outside of their chosen field, they are already hubristic enough as is.

For what it's worth, this phenomenon is widespread beyond technologists. It's easy to think that because you're really good in one field, that you must be really good in other fields too. But sadly it generally isn't so.

For sure, it's not up to technologists alone to solve these problems, but we should be willing to be part of the larger discussion and to learn more about the social ramifications of technological choices.

We did have those discussions. That's why the licenses are written the way they are. "Don't do evil" with the license is not a term that can be added either in theory or in practice. There is no world in which suddenly the prison-industrial complex is stopped because we wrote the right licenses.

You can make more narrow restrictions, but those will still have a way of backfiring or having unanticipated results anyhow, not to mention that I'm yet to see one of these sorts of licenses end up on a product where it actually matters anyhow.

Practically and legally speaking, there's no lever here to discuss the misuse of. I mean, heck, I'd give you at least a 25% chance these things were already developed in a context that doesn't permit open source to be used anyhow.

> the problems they create

So the authors of busybox, linux kernel, display drivers, and all of the myriad open source components used are responsible for basically every embedded hardware product in the world?

I believe the guy who made jslint added a clause to all his MIT licensed software just like that. Lots of people complained and Google ended up building their own implementation of whatever bit they liked and wanted to include in their own software to bypass the licensing issues.

Prison telecom companies are already an ethical black hole. Fees for local calls can run on the order of dollars per minute, and payment is made as difficult and punitive as possible for the families.

An attempt of mine from many years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559904

It’s a hard space to define and navigate, as the comments indicate.

We can't, or else it's no longer Open Source.

BUT, maybe there's room for a reasonably permissive proprietary license that is based around moral restrictions. Plenty of people still use proprietary software; so if you're already doing that, I could see a semi-open "ethics license" fitting in. You couldn't include it in other GPL or MIT licensed libraries, but again, if you're already building proprietary software, those restrictions probably don't matter to you.

Facebook's video chatting device, whatever it is, seems like a perfect candidate for this market.