If only programmers were expected to swear an oath of refusal to work on user-hostile systems: "Participants in the DRM debate implicitly hold the view that th

If only programmers were expected to swear an oath of refusal to work on user-hostile systems: "Participants in the DRM debate implicitly hold the view that the ownership of your operating system, your personal information, and your media is a complex, joint relationship between you, your operating system vendor, the authors of the applications you run, and the owners of any media that pass through that application. Prevailing wisdom is that the way any given software behaves should be jointly determined by all these parties, factoring in all their interests, and that the argument is simply a matter of degree: who should be given how much control, and by what mechanism. I don't like to think of myself as an extremist, but on this issue, I can find no other position to take. When I hear lawmakers, commercial software developers, and even other open source programmers, asking questions like, "how much control should we afford to content producers in media playback programs?", I cannot help but think of Charles Babbage: "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." The "you don't own your computer" paradigm is not merely wrong. It is violently, disastrously wrong, and the consequences of this error are likely to be felt for generations to come, unless steps are taken to prevent it." "Ethics for Programmers: Primum non Nocere" http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html I do, however, wonder how many could keep such an oath, esp. under present economic conditions. And most people, I think, will happily build, say, baby-mulchers if simply asked to - even without the threat of starvation. Human beings are sheep. Ultimately, we, the programmers, are the foot-soldiers of DRM.