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mejutocotoday at 10:52 AM1 replyview on HN

> How do you make good or bad resolvable?

It is not a computer program, but a an ethics problem. We can solve it by thinking of the context and the ethics of it.

I realize it is the topic of this thread, but OP did not mention anything in relation to licenses, and was just talking about good and bad not existing objectively (without context).

I think, if we came with a specific situation, most people with similar values might reach the same good/bad verdict, and a small minority might reach a different one.

I believe the Tyson Foods example is overly simplistic and still too abstract, because one can be vegetarian for many reasons, and these would affect the "verdict". In the real world, if we were working on that piece of software the question would be: Does the implementation of this specific hr SAP module for Tyson foods by me, a vegetarian against animals suffering unnecessarily, etc. as opposed as the abstract idea of any piece of code and any vegetarian. If a friend called you: I have this situation at work, they are asking me to write software to do x and I feel bad about it, etc. etc. I bet it would not be difficult to know what is right and wrong. Another aspect of it is, we could agree something is wrong (bad) and you might still do it. That does not mean there is no objective reality, just that you might not have options or that your values might not be the ones you think (or say) they are, for example.


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kryptiskttoday at 11:29 AM

But in a typical FOSS scenario, your decision to open source the code and Tyson Foods decision to use it are decoupled. You don't know who all the potential users are when you open source it, so you can't consider all the concrete cases and make sure that the license reflects them. In the same way Tyson Foods isn't going to contact all the creators of libraries they want to use and ask if their concrete use case is in line with the creator's ethics.

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