'Everyone Should Have a Moral Code' Says Developer Who Deleted Code Sold to ICE

Re:'Everyone Should Have a Moral Code' Says Developer Who De... by commandlinefan on Friday September 20, 2019 @12:37PM (#21028571)

This sort of thing hurts open source, too - when you buy software, the contract is that they'll continue allowing you to use it as long as the check clears. Now, with open source, you don't have to pay... but you have to run your business/government the way each individual developer agrees with?

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Re:'Everyone Should Have a Moral Code' Says Developer Who De... by rsnor on Friday September 20, 2019 @01:02PM (#21028888)

Not exactly.

Developers ultimately have judgement over which projects they contribute to, and if they feel that more harm is coming out of their work than good, then they have every right to cease development.

Open source, compared to other development models, suffers the least from this problem in that there is no single developer that has jurisdiction over how the product is used. FOSS projects can always be forked, if need be.

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Re:'Everyone Should Have a Moral Code' Says Developer Who De... by rdl on Friday September 20, 2019 @12:43PM (#21028650)

Arguably he did people a service by reminding relying parties of this vulnerability. Both that upstreams might pull their repos, and that upstreams might incompetently run their distribution infrastructure (all the npm issues...)

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Re:'Everyone Should Have a Moral Code' Says Developer Who De... by olliej on Friday September 20, 2019 @12:40PM (#21028610)

...yes?

If you want to have availability guarantees you should arrange a paid contract. Otherwise you are literally demanding someone else do free work for you.

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Re:'Everyone Should Have a Moral Code' Says Developer Who De... by cabaalis on Friday September 20, 2019 @12:47PM (#21028716)

I'm going to have to say yes on this one. If you have no contract with the developer, you're SOL.

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Re:'Everyone Should Have a Moral Code' Says Developer Who De... by jen20 on Saturday September 21, 2019 @02:21PM (#21036985)

> when you buy software, the contract is that they'll continue allowing you to use it as long as the check clears

Have you ever actually read a proprietary software license?

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