Comment by BrenBarn
3 days ago
> There are serious questions about copyright, labor, energy use, slop, and maintainers drowning in generated contributions. But these tools are also becoming part of how software is made. The Open Source world needs to figure out how to engage with that future, not just divide into camps.
Everyone who says stuff like this is just burying their head in the sand. That is like saying that there are serious questions about the ethics of buying sweatshop-made clothes, or driving a gas-powered car, or robbing grocery stores --- but those are becoming part of life, and so we need to "figure out how to engage with them".
That doesn't mean you have to upend your life to fight the good fight. You can say "I want a world without X, but right now I need X to live, so I do X, while maintaining an awareness of it and looking for opportunities to do less X". You can say "I want a world with some kinds of X but not others, so I do the X that I'm okay with". You can even say "I think X is ethically fine so I'll do it". But it just doesn't make sense to say "there are ethical issues with X, but those only affect how we engage with it, and have no bearing on whether we think people should need to engage with it at all".
There can't be ethical consideration of "how" without at least considering the ethics of "whether".
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