Defining - and dealing with - Evil
Posted
by Chris Becke
on Stack Overflow
See other posts from Stack Overflow
or by Chris Becke
Published on 2010-05-28T07:56:19Z
Indexed on
2010/05/28
8:01 UTC
Read the original article
Hit count: 290
best-practices
|privacy
As a software developer one sometimes gets feature requests that seem to be in some kind of morally grey area. Sometimes one can deflect them, or implement them in a way that feels less 'evil' - sometimes - on reflection - while the feature request 'feels' wrong theres no identifiable part of it that actually causes harm. Sometimes one feels a feature is totally innocent but various anti virus products start tagging one as malware.
For example - I personally consider EULAs to (a) hopefully be unenforceable and (b) a means by which rights are REMOVED from consumers. However Anti Virus scanners frequently mark as malware any kind of download agent that does not display a EULA. Which to me is the result of a curious kind of double think.
What I want to know is - are there any online (or offline) resources that cover evil software development practices? How can I know if a software practice that I consider dodgy is in fact evil enough to consider fighting?
© Stack Overflow or respective owner