Free software development always has an ethical dimension. We develop free software instead of proprietary software to allow people, the users of our software, to not be as controlled by vendors of proprietary software as they might otherwise be.

Software freedom is, however, only one ethical dimension. Free software can also be unethical, for example by doing things that hurt people. As an extreme example, a free software implementation of ransomware would be quite problematic, under any licence. It doesn't matter if the program is, say, under the GPL licence, if it attacks people's computers, and encrypts their data and refuses to decrypt it until the author of the program has paid a ransom. Not even if the program installs its own source code on the computer when it encrypts all other data would it be considered ethical.

When you write software you should consider the ethics, the morality, and the impact on everyone. For example:

• Does it promote racism, sexism, or violence, directly or indirectly? For example, if it's an "AI" that tries to guess if someone will commit a crime in the future, is it effectively only based their race?

• Does it use bandwidth unneccessarily? Bandwidth is an expensive luxury in some parts of the worlds, so wasting it discrimnates against people in those parts of the world.

• Does it "call home", such as report usage to the developers? This violates user privacy. Gathering usage statistics can be very useful to the developers in more ways than one, but to do so without requesting permission remains a violation of privacy.

Have you encountered ethically problematic software? Or perhaps have you found some exemplar of ethical software development? Why not give an example in the comments below...