Only if their warhawk counterparts hold their next shindig somewhere in Gaza (So they can see first-hand what the consequences of their work and advocacy look like).
If you don’t want to build weapons because you don’t like the variety of ways they may be wielded, that’s a valid and reasonable ethical stance.
If you don’t want to build anything that could ever potentially be used in the manufacture of those weapons, you probably shouldn’t be building open source software or contributing anything to do with any programming language at all.
When the defense industry funds things they tend to go for architectures without a single point of failure and have the resources to create new things if the existing things are insufficient or adversarial. DARPA funding created the internet etc.
Meanwhile if you were to get the defense industry to not use your product, they're not going to go out of business or do less of whatever you didn't like. They're going to bring the same money to someone like Oracle or Microsoft with no qualms about taking it -- or bring even more money to them, which is your tax money, as those companies charge quite a lot.
This makes me suspicious that the people agitating for "don't take their money" are being subtly or not so subtly encouraged to do so by the people who want to take their money instead. After all, the historical norm is the opposite. Not just TCP/IP but Tor and SELinux and microprocessors and, considering that AT&T has long been a major defense contractor, transistors and lasers and solar panels and C and all the rest of it. Are the same people who want to refuse their money also inclined to refuse all of the other things it paid for?
Would we be better off if the University of California never took a Unix license or created BSD because of where it came from?
I will point out that I am well aware of, and respect the stance that bad things done multiple-degrees-removed-from-you are not, like, entirely your responsibility. Or even necessarily your responsibility at all.
I did, however, have to expand on the concept that it's very easy to have strong opinions about war when you yourself are sheltered from the consequences of it.
This comparison is irrelevant to the conversation. But even otherwise it is misleading and leaves out lots of history. The modern state of Israel has existed for that long - but if anything, it’s a war for Jewish people’s existence in land that was historically Jewish. And it wouldn’t be a “war” if Israel could exist peacefully and not constantly be threatened by terrorists. Most people don’t see a problem with a war of self defense in response to October 7, so I’m not sure what you think would happen if “warhawks” saw the “consequences” of their work. If anything, this is a low casualty conflict compared to most.
I'm referring to the settlement land grabs and displacements that happened after 1967, not to its existence of either 1947 or 1967 borders. (Which have their own humanitarian problems, but that's something else.)
I don’t think it’s right to make comparisons like this. But if you really want to go there, have you tried comparing the death toll? In Ukraine, it’s likely around three quarters of a million dead in two years.
