Re:More jails replace in-person visits with awful video chat...
by heyitsguay on Monday April 08, 2019 @02:36PM
(#19607861)
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.
Re:More jails replace in-person visits with awful video chat...
by jerf on Monday April 08, 2019 @03:10PM
(#19608138)
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.
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.