[stravant]

As for me that's a risk I'm willing to accept in return for the freedom of the code.

I'm not going to deliberately write code that's LIKELY to do more harm than good, but crippling the potential positive impact just because of some largely hypothetical risk? That feels almost selfish, what would I really be trying to avoid, personally running into a feel-bad outcome?

[martin-t]

I think it would be most interesting to find ways to restrict bad usage without crippling the positive impact.

Douglas Crockford[0] tried this with JSON. Now, strictly speaking, this does not satisfy the definition of Open Source (it merely is open source, lowercase). But after 10 years of working on Open Source, I came to the conclusion that Open Source is not the absolute social good we delude ourselves into thinking.

Sure, it's usually better than closed source because the freedoms mean people tend to have more control and it's harder for anyone (including large corporations) to restrict those freedoms. But I think it's a local optimum and we should start looking into better alternatives.

Android, for example, is nominally Open Source but in reality the source is only published by google periodically[1], making any true cooperation between the paid devs and the community difficult. And good luck getting this to actually run on a physical device without giving up things like Google Play or banking apps or your warranty.

There's always ways to fuck people over and there always will be but we should look into further ways to limit and reduce them.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford

[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/aosp-source-code-schedule-3...

[babarock]

> Open Source is not the absolute social good we delude ourselves into thinking.

Historically the term "Open Source" was specifically developed to divorce the movement from the "social good" ideas that were promoted by Free Software.

That's where I stand. I don't do Open Source to make the world better. I do Open Source because I believe that makes my software better.

I'm not an activist. I'm an engineer. Nothing wrong with activism, all the power to the people doing it, but the licensing I chose for my code doesn't take it into account.