You can not select more than 25 topics
Topics must start with a letter or number, can include dashes ('-') and can be up to 35 characters long.
49 lines
2.3 KiB
49 lines
2.3 KiB
5 years ago
|
+++
|
||
|
title = "Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Take Responsibility For The Use Of Your Code"
|
||
|
date = 2019-07-18
|
||
|
|
||
|
[taxonomies]
|
||
|
tags = ["en-au", "books", "things i learnt", "personal", "responsibility"]
|
||
|
+++
|
||
|
|
||
|
This is hard. Very very hard. It's the difference between "freedom" and
|
||
|
"responsibility".
|
||
|
|
||
|
<!-- more -->
|
||
|
|
||
|
There is nothing wrong in writing, for example, a software to capture people's
|
||
|
faces and detect their ethnicity, but you have to think about what that will
|
||
|
be used on.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Even on an open source project, you can take responsibility without blocking
|
||
|
people. You can make your project harder for people trying to abuse to use it,
|
||
|
to the point they will have to take control of their own fork.
|
||
|
|
||
|
One example is a small application called [Tusky](https://tusky.app/), which
|
||
|
is "An Android client for the microblogging server Mastodon", completely open
|
||
|
source. Mastodon is a network of microblogging servers with connect to each
|
||
|
other, kinda like Twitter, but you can pick a different server that is not
|
||
|
twitter.com and still get updates from that server. One of the servers that
|
||
|
appeared in the server list is an alt-right server which, as most alt-right
|
||
|
forums, promote a lot of hate. What Tusky did? When you try to add an account
|
||
|
on that server, instead of adding the account, [they play a video of Never
|
||
|
Gonna Give You Up](https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/pull/1303), basically
|
||
|
[rickrolling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling) anyone who, well, is
|
||
|
an alt-righter.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Tusky broke the open source license? No, the code is still available. Anyone
|
||
|
wanting to use the server can pick the code, fork it, remove the rickroll and
|
||
|
release their own version of the application. But Tusky developers took an
|
||
|
instead of saying "We'll not take part in promoting hate speech" and one can't
|
||
|
deny that they did.
|
||
|
|
||
|
It is a bit hard to do so on the company code -- you would get some reprimands
|
||
|
if you try to shame or block one of the company clients from using the company
|
||
|
application -- but you [can say no](/books/things-i-learnt/say-no) and,
|
||
|
depending on how offensive you think the use the code is, you can even start
|
||
|
looking for a new place to work. People on larger and "cooler" companies, like
|
||
|
Google, left their jobs because they didn't agree with what the company was
|
||
|
doing, and so can you.
|
||
|
|
||
|
{{ chapters(prev_chapter_link="/books/things-i-learnt/say-no", prev_chapter_title="Learn To Say No") }}
|