Re: non military license for ada

[Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org>]

Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing whensk <noname@myob.com>wrote:
> The trouble is, these politicians are beholden to
> specialized interests ... tobacco, arms etc.

.. And the former points out a probably more interesting case.

A dozen years ago, would-be-pacifists liked to make up licenses
forbidding "military use" or its use by anyone having anything to do
with South Africa (because they had heard somewhere that Apartheid Was
Bad and should be protested), which generally led to the resultant
software being considered an irrelevant curiosity because evaluating
whether particular use was legal or not just wasn't worth doing.

Today, "everyone" knows that the tobacco industry is bad, evil, and
such, and so it would be perfectly sensible to forbid use of your
software by the "tobacco industry," right?

So Philip Morris and Company shouldn't use the code.

But what are the /real/ implications?  Should it just by PM&C?  Or
should it also be their ad agency?  (Probably) 

But how about some subsidiary that PM&C owns that has nothing really
to do with tobacco?

In Canada, our "poster child" on this was the Imperial Tobacco
Company, which (at one point) owned:
 a) Shoppers Drug Mart, the biggest national chain of drug stores, and
 b) Canada Trust, one of the better financial institutions.

Should SDM and CT be permitted to use the software?  Or are they
boycotted too?  

And if they /are/ boycotted, does this not run the risk of making
/everyone/ steer clear of your software, thus leading to the software
being an irrelevant curiosity?

That oughtn't be an easy set of questions to answer...
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