From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,2d9aad84ea395c96 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-03-14 12:52:19 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!sn-xit-02!sn-xit-06!sn-xit-08!supernews.com!news.tele.dk!news.tele.dk!small.news.tele.dk!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!hse-mtl-ppp74818.qc.sympatico.CA!not-for-mail From: Christopher Browne Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: non military license for ada Date: 14 Mar 2003 20:52:16 GMT Organization: cbbrowne Computing Inc Message-ID: References: <6a90b886.0303140243.7908f923@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: hse-mtl-ppp74818.qc.sympatico.ca (64.229.210.87) X-Trace: fu-berlin.de 1047675136 71986937 64.229.210.87 (16 [125932]) X-Home-Page: http://www.cbbrowne.com/info/ X-Affero: http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=cbbrowne X-Emacs-Acronym: Elsewhere Maybe All Commands are Simple Microsoft: Where the service packs are larger than the original releases. X-Uboat-Death-Message: ATTACKED BY ATOMIC BOMB 14E 33N. SINKING. U-176. X-Draft-From: ("nntp+chvatal:comp.lang.ada" 9019) Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:35342 Date: 2003-03-14T20:52:16+00:00 List-Id: Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing whensk 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... -- If this was helpful, rate me http://cbbrowne.com/info/sap.html "I heard that if you play the Windows CD backward, you get a satanic message. But that's nothing compared to when you play it forward: It installs Windows...." -- G. R. Gaudreau