John Burkhardt on Mitch Kapor’s exit from Groove:
It is a tough issue and one that I’ve struggled with personally. I have no details, nor will I, of what exactly Poindexter is doing with Groove. But I don’t quite see it as the same moral dilema as that of creating the atom bomb. From our perspective we are building collaboration software. What people end up collaborating about is their business – not ours. Maybe that’s niave. Its hard for me to know where to draw the line. Should Bjarne worry that the project uses c++? Should Tim Berners Lee worry that it uses html? What if it uses email? The telephone? SQL? Groove provides a secure and decentralized communications infrastructure. It doesn’t specifically help the government spy on us.