Developer's Ethical Responsibilities

What responsibilities do developers have to the consumers of their software. That is a question I have been pondering lately. I'll use myspace as an example. This is a "social networking site" where people put up lots of information about themselves that is then basically available to anyone who happens to stumble upon it (Ok so the developers put an option for private accounts but still). This website has been in a bit of controversy in the past over the way that some of their users where using it to "abuse" other users. On the one hand, the site in so far as we know, was designed to allow people to connect with each other. However at this point it's original intent is being subverterd and it's now potentially posing a risk for it's users.

Well what does that have to do with developers? Well obviously they had to build the site and it was they who made it possible for example for you to search for other people using advanced searching criteria. Without the developers there is no website. On the other hand it is the users who put up all that information about themselves and allow others to view and comment on it.

So what my question really boils down to is this, do developers have the responsibility to consider the possible malevolent uses of their projects? Or is something like myspace really just a tool and misuse of it is really the fault of the users and not the developers. Furthermore, as members of a community, if the developers realize that this misuse is taking place what is their responsibility to the community with regards to their handiwork. This is probably a more "innocent" example but it still holds. This is really just something I like to think about as I think it poses an interesting dileema and ofcourse we can explore other types of software not just social networking, the latter is just an easy target.

I don't really know what the correct "answer" is or if there can even be one but I'd be interested in hearing people's opinions on this. I think this is an important question going forward with KDE as the desktop is seemingly becoming more and more intertwined with the internet. Thus it seems looking at these kinds of "ethics" questions is a sensible thing to do.


In other news, finals are comming, after which I will have more time; so I plan to go back to the orignial intent of this blog, which is to follow my "journey" into kde contribution. I'll try to keep this blog more "code" based as opposed to random musings such as these since I find those blogs more interesting to read anyways. I've been really interested in C# support in qt/kde so I may have a look at that in my next post.