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