Disclaimer: the views expressed on this site do not nessecarily reflect those of my employer
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
NY Times is reporting on Mitch's resignation from the Groove board of directors. The story focuses on TIA as one of the primary reasons. Jeroen says it scares him and provided a link to Tim Bishops post in which he asks:
"commercial software developers are going to start wrestling with the same issues that physicists have wrestled with since World War II. To what degree are they responsible for the ends to which their tools are put?"
It is a tough issue and one that I've struggled with personally. I have no details, nor will I, of what exactly Poindexter is doing with Groove. But I don't quite see it as the same moral dilema as that of creating the atom bomb. From our perspective we are building collaboration software. What people end up collaborating about is their business - not ours. Maybe that's niave. Its hard for me to know where to draw the line. Should Bjarne worry that the project uses c++? Should Tim Berners Lee worry that it uses html? What if it uses email? The telephone? SQL? Groove provides a secure and decentralized communications infrastructure. It doesn't specifically help the government spy on us.
As in interesting side note, my grandmother did a bunch of math on the Manhattan project! Yikes!
