The title of this year's talk is The Ethics Void. Here's a rough abstract:
Medicine, legal, finance, journalism, scientific research—each of these fields and many others have widely adopted codes of ethics governing the lives of their professionals. Some of these codes may even be enshrined in law. And this is for good reason: these are fields that have enormous consequences.
Software and technology pervade not only through these fields, but through virtually every aspect of our lives. Yet, when compared to other fields, our community leaders and educators have produced an ethics void. Last year, I introduced numerous topics concerning #privacy, #security, and #freedom that raise serious ethical concerns. Join me this year as we consider some of those examples and others in an attempt to derive a code of ethics that compares to each of these other fields, and to consider how leaders and educators should approach ethics within education and guidance.
For this talk, I want to solicit the community at various points. I know what _I_ want to talk about, but what are some of the most important ethical issues to _you_? Unfortunately there's far too much to fit into a 40m talk! Also feel free to e-mail me at mtg@gnu.org.
I won't have the time to get into the low-level details tonight, but this is nasty. There are plenty of things I can say here to reiterate various topics, but I don't think that'd be constructive just yet; let's let others discover some corollaries for themselves.
Happy New Year!
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jan-2018 00:59:49 EST
Mike GerwitzMy holiday vacation (as in, not-at-work) is over. Suddenly the snow and howling winds don't mean "let's build an igloo with the kids!". I'm back to the grumpy "gah I have to wake up and start my car, brush it off, scrape it off, shovel this shit, drive to work in slush with controlled sliding, and walk into my first day back to work cold and grumpy, mis-typing my password five times because my fingers are half-frozen and my password is all muscle memory."
@bjoern The issue was that using something like "GPL-3.0" isn't clear to the user---especially users inexperienced with licensing---that it won't be compatible with future versions of the GPL. When a user chooses a license for her project, there's nothing suspicious about "GPL-3.0".
If it's "GPL-3.0-only", though", users will wonder what the alternative to "only" might be.
@dthompson Jones is within ~3000 votes now, with remaining in his favor. This is going to be close! I wonder if this is how sports people feel during a good game...I'm not a sports guy. ;)
@dthompson I'm anxious too. This is one hell of an election season. It's going to be a big deal either way, but as I speak now, we're 50/49 Moore, with the gap continuing to close.
My statement was ambiguous: I meant a gift idea for my wife to buy for me, not something for me to buy her. She was hounding me for ideas and I had none.
I have plenty of ideas for her, and she has no interest in computer science. ;)
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Friday, 08-Dec-2017 22:52:06 EST
Mike GerwitzFinally came up with a Christmas gift idea for my wife: The Reasoned Schemer. I've been wanting to read it since before my son was born just over six years ago. I'm likely familiar with much of the material, but I still expect to learn something. I absolutely loved reading The Little Schemer many years back---the style and approach is wonderful. I already knew Scheme at the time and it was still enlightening and captivating---the most elementary material was an adventure. I haven't had the chance to read The Seasoned Schemer yet.
The Little Schemer is what introduced me to the Y Combinator (the actual combinator, not the company), actually.