Do you think the Ardupilot people were blind to the military applications of what they were making? I personally can't imagine anyone bright enough to work on drone autopilots to be simultaneously ignorant enough not to realize that a drone could be used for harmful applications.
I know several people who've contributed to Ardupilot who are 100% "hobby guys". I've modified Ardupilot (and BetaFlight and iNav) for my own hobby use (but nothing really worth or in a state to contribute back).
While it's true drone technology "could be used for harmful applications", that's also true for, say, compilers. Do you hold the gcc/clang developers to account for being "blind to the military applications of what they were making"? Or OpenStreetMap contributors? Or the engineers who designed the HiLux? Or the Casio F-91W watch designers? None of those were "designed for military application" yet all ended up being used for them.
Where does the line need to get drawn? between my rights to design/build/fly drones as a hobby, commercial/industrial rights to use drones for photography or cinematograpy or crop monitoring or search and rescue or shark surveillance at swimming beachs - and the need to restrict "military applications" of that?
Are people who, say, write blog posts explaining how to use microcontroller RTOS libraries for hard real time guarantees, with mentioned examples like nuclear power plant control "blind to the military applications of what they're making"? (Yeah, sorry. I profile stalked you a little there...)
I don't mind the profile stalking, but if you stalked me more you'd have seen that I'm a former weapons engineer for the Dutch navy, so making things with potential military applications does not bother me as much as you might think. (Ironically, that arduino CoPilot library is based on software specifically designed for drone applications, so does that count as military software redirected towards civilian applications?)
In any case, this discussion is pretty similar to the "AWS is running my FOSS database as a service without paying me" debate. If you don't want your software to be used for certain applications, don't release it under a license stating that you can do anything with it. If you think the good that you do for the world by releasing some good new tech is greater than the harm done to the world, spread it as widely as you can. Ardupilot is in this category IMO: even if some militias try to make their own combat drones with it, the overall good done by making drone technology available to all could well be greater. The idea that you can make something "perfect" (that is with no imaginable harmful applications whatsoever) is probably not viable in this imperfect world filled with less than perfect people. Even very harmless things like teddy bears can be used to enable violent acts, but that does not mean we should stop making them.
Yeah, I guess I was reacting (badly) to "to be simultaneously ignorant enough not to realize that a drone could be used for harmful applications".
I, personally, don't ever want to let that argument stop me from building shit that I want to build for fun. Like I pointed out, Hiluxes and F-19Ws have become well know "tools of trade" for freedom fighters and terrorists. Obviously totally not the intend ofd the designers, and even in retrospect nobody sane would say "Toyota should never have built and sold the HiLux because it's too easy to mount a machine gun in the tray!"
Could my ongoing projects to build sub 100g autonomous drones be misused by people to do harm? Maybe? Could my experimenting with LoRa Mesh Networking be misused by people to do harm? Maybe? Could my project to try using GPS and ADSB to aim a camera with a high powered zoom lens on a gimbal to take pics of planes be misused by people to do harm? Maybe? Am I going to stop doing any of those things because of that? Nope. On the other hand, would I experiment with a drone carrying explosives? Nope. Would I mount a laser on the camera gimbal auto aiming at planes? Nope. I don't know if my personal lines in the sand have any valid arguments behind them other than "that's just where my personal morals/ethics draws the line", and I wouldn't hold other people to account for having their own lines drawn somewhat differently. But I will judge both far ends of the bell curve there as "way too irresponsible" or "way too paranoid".
Having said that, two companies in another comment of mine here DroneSheild and EOS have both tried to headhunt me (DroneShield directly, EOS I'm 98% certain it was them the recruiter was trying to pimp me to..) And both times I was _seriously_ tempted just because the technical challeneges seem like so much fun. I declined both approaches though, having decided I didn't want to work in that industry. My dad was a defence contractor pretty much his entire career, so I don't judge people who _do_ choose that industry. It can certainly be lucrative, and _most_ of what dad worked on at least was defence or training, rather than attack weapons.
This isn't really a new thing - the military can and will use open source code to more effectively kill people. That happens with every new technology. Drone tech is going to be the biggest killer this century assuming that we don't have a war where ICBMs get deployed.
