In response to Open Letter against MIC sponsorship.
For many years, tech workers have refused to work with Western militaries and the private defense companies that supply them, citing ethical concerns about the ever-growing Military Industrial Complex. Dwight Eisenhower, commander of Allied forces in World War 2, said it well:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
His warning is as true today as it was in 1953. All the same, Western hegemony is currently under attack by authoritarian regimes around the globe. And while many—including those in the Nix community—are right to criticize the grievous injustices it perpetuates, this hegemony provides and protects the basic human rights we enjoy:
- freedom of speech
- civil liberties
- women's rights
- democratic governance
- rule of law
- equality under the law
We are not at the end of history: recent world events show us that we can not take these values for granted. We must defend them—sometimes with great violence—from those who would try to take them away.
Defending our values requires the development of new weapons systems and the software that drives them. War has always spurred technological development, and while this produces new terrors, it has also provided miracles of the modern world, including the Internet and high-level programming languages.
To the Foundation
We ask you to think deeply about the long term consequences of your decisions, beyond public relations. There is a loud crowd opposed to any intersection between Nix and military development. But loud doesn't mean right. We are asking the NixOS Foundation to take a strong, maximalist stance on who is allowed to contribute to the Nix community, and where people are excluded, to establish a clear set of guidelines consistent with the principle of free speech. We hope NixOS foundation members share our love of individual rights of expression, for all humans, everywhere.
Implementation Details
By signing this open letter, we endorse Western, Enlightenment values. We understand that these values must be protected from violent authoritarians who would undermine them, and insist that there is no inherent evil in using violence to protect those values when they come under attack.
Signing
If you agree with the contents of this letter, you can open a Pull Request at this letter's repository, add a file under signatures named the same as your GitHub account, and write out how you want the signature to appear.
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You can also create a file using the Web UI.
Signatories
1 signatures- Max Koko (@maxkokocom)