The point is to not be seen to ally with known war-profiteers, I suppose.

And I applaud the backbone it takes to attain such a position, personally.

While I think you're being genuine, remember si vis pacem para bellum: "if you want peace, prepare for war". A blanket antimilitary view is very dangerous. A company should only be ostracised if it's helping carry out war crimes.

We can see this right now with the Ukraine invasion. The 'peace' side is advocating giving Putin whatever he wants.

Exactly. If NATO countries maintained cold war weapons and ammo stockpiles, the war would already be lost for russia. Instead we got unilateral demilitarization .

Ukraine disarmed their nuclear stockpile. Obviously Russia wouldn’t have invaded otherwise.

Sure, and that's a lesson for all other nuclear and potentially nuclear states.

Ukraine as part of disarmament treaties even send russia Kh-55 cruise missiles and Tu-160 strategic bombers that are now used against them.

> Ukraine disarmed their nuclear stockpile. Obviously Russia wouldn’t have invaded otherwise.

They disarmed their nuclear stockpile and their long range strike capability under an international agreement where the largest players in the world made promises / guarantees to them.

My guess is that they suspected that Russia would actually follow them and not break it because they felt like it.

It takes a lot more motivation to raise an offensive army than a defensive one (assuming that your populace believes that your society is worth defending, anyway).

I don’t. I think it’s counter productive. Going by that reasoning we shouldn’t be using the Internet because it was funded by DARPA.

NixOS is open source. Anduril can just use it anyway. Besides, almost every major tech company will have defense ties in one way or another.

War happens when the other party things that they can defeat you without too great a cost.

Developing weapons for your country is anti-war too.

Good thing then that the US has never started any wars! Of course, a for-profit industry that depends on wars (or at the very least, the fear that such is always imminent) would also never lobby to increase demand for their products and services.

(/s)

But that's an entirely separate argument. At the end of the day we have to live in the real world where human aggression exists.

If you have no defense, then you have no defense. If that's how you want to live, don't hide behind some other argument.

You'll have something that someone else wants or needs and they're going to club you over the head for it. You seem to be okay with that. That's cool, but I'm not. I'm for damned-sure going to have a better club or preferably a knife or a gun as a) a deterrent, or failing that b) a way to improve my odds of survival.

Nonsense. Developing diplomacy for your nation is anti-war.

But we know that diplomatic corps don't get even a pittance of the funding that the warrior hordes do ..

Diplomacy requires bargaining power. Carrots AND sticks.

You've got a very naive view of the world.

I think it is you who has a naive view of the world because at the moment in US diplomacy, there are no carrots, there are only sticks and the world is definitely sick and tired of that shit.

You are aware that global trade only exists as it is now for the last 70 years due to the US Navy protecting shipping routes and basically for free, right?

If you think there are "no carrots" offered by the US, you're a silly person living in a fantasy world. Clearly there are carrots because the US has lots of positive diplomatic relationships with a pretty large percentage of the world's countries.

We don't do this through having a boot on everyone's neck. We don't live in some fantasy story where the US is "The Great Evil".

> Getting some goodwill of non-paying users

I think you'll find they'll loose goodwill from some other non-paying folks. There are many people who code and use this technology who are pro-military. They may not speak up in the same circles as those who are against this but they exist. I'm only pointing this out to showcase the market is more diverse than people often realize.

also there is a silent majority, who does not have a special stance on lots of topics, just thinks like live and let live, and these kind of signalling are always a bad news for them (regardless of anti- or pro-something), as these useless drama-acts signal further polarization of the world, which often signal that some political takeover has happened in organizations which are not inherently political. This often signals a loss of focus for projects. (think GNU for example)

Yeah, political statement and stances taken in venues/spaces that are not appropriate are not good IMO. We need less of that.

Accepting sponsorship money from a company that designs and manufactures killing machines is a political statement, though. It is impossible to avoid political stances and live in the real world.

> There are many people who code and use this technology who are pro-military

But are they pro-US military or they might be pro-other countries military?

Large defense contractors are almost never exclusive to one country. For instance, the F35 is being procured by 17 different NATO and non-NATO countries. Similarly, Anduril has a number of European customers.