Comment by lentil_soup
21 days ago
> You think that Google's best and brightest are working on the Google Play store?
No idea, whoever they are they're still well compensated and can afford some resistance
> What makes you so sure that such a hypothetical code of ethics would promote user freedom? I think it far more likely that protecting the user from harm (i.e., not allowing the user to install malware) would appear in that code.
Maybe? Maybe not? I never said I'm sure of it, but computing is built on a history of openness and interoperability. We at somepoint agreed having open hardware and protocols was the way to go, and we were right. A lot of the world runs on open source software, we managed to built the internet, we have PCs where you can swap components and it just works. None of that is obvious if you were to re-invent it in 2025. Malware is an excuse, you can battle that without losing any of the above.
> No idea, whoever they are they're still well compensated and can afford some resistance
Claiming that people you've never met are sufficiently financially secure to risk their livelihood for your protest movement is the kind of hubris I hope to never have.
> computing is built on a history of openness and interoperability
There was nothing inevitable about this, and while it is the superior engineering choice, that's not how decisions are made. Open standards and protocols only gained industry support because those industry players were trying to commoditise their complements, and open standards were the only way to achieve that. There are plenty of players in the industry who work under the monolithic closed-source model, but we 'cool kids' never hear about them, because they only talk to massive businesses with procurement departments.
>> Claiming that people you've never met are sufficiently financially secure to risk their livelihood for your protest movement is the kind of hubris I hope to never have.
I don't understand your agressiveness towards me, this is a conversation, we can talk and disagree without insulting.
I don't know every developer at Google or their situation but the idea that they're victims of a system that forces their hand is a stretch. There's people resisting changes they don't want at every step of the soci-economical ladder in different countries across countries and cultures. I can 100% understand a single person not being able to do so given their life circustances, but we're talking about a change across an organisation that probably encompases 100s of people, this is not resting on a single person. As I said in my original post, there's doctors in poorer countries with better ethics, what's different about developers?
> I don't understand your agressiveness towards me, this is a conversation, we can talk and disagree without insulting.
I agree wholeheartedly, and if I really wanted to insult you, I wouldn't bother replying to you at all. You're clearly putting some thought into this, and I respect that, but I think your take is really bad.
I work in the gambling industry. Each weekday, I start my laptop with the knowledge that thousands of people will be hurt by the work I do. Not just the people who play the games, but their families, their children, and, in some cases, their employers who are embezzled from. But my employer treats me better than any other employer I've had, and not just in terms of money (even though I'm not well paid as far as software engineers go). My first career was as a schoolteacher - the poster child of the ethical career - and my fellow teachers treated me like dog shit, in numerous schools: people will do awful things to each other when they believe they're acting for 'the greater good'.
I don't think we can argue that the software engineers at Google are acting unethically because we don't know what choices they have, and we don't know what obligations they have outside their work. I'm not sure that we can argue that 'software freedom' is beneficial to everyone outside a small elite of power users. As much as we can argue that what Google has decided is bad for us as individuals, I don't think we have enough information to morally condemn the people who made and implemented that decision.