Sergey

raised the issue of restricting use of software to non-military use, and Alan pointed out how much they’ve given back to the FLOSS community.

However, I’d like to point out that any such restriction violates rules for opensource used by both the FSF and Debian.

Debian is pretty clear about it in the social contract:

No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

And in the GNU Free Software Definition:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

So any such restriction would mean your software is no longer free software.

It’s not that I’m in any way pro military, but allowing usage restrictions will cause a huge mess. Next we’ll have some application which may not be used by religious zealots (of any kind), paedophiles, and at some point end up with a huge licensing mess (maybe even full of discrimination). (“No, I can’t sell you a web server, because your brother-in-law is in the military.”?)

Actually disallowing any military use is some kind of discrimination, too. Military is not only used to kill someone, but it can serve humanitarian purposes, too. Rescue people in flooded New Orleans etc. - if you are unhappy with what your government is using your military for, vote accordingly and do politics.

It’s fine if you as the author point out that you disapprove of any use of it to harm anybody, or commit crimes; but don’t put up restrictions you couldn’t verify anyway. (As if the military would care much for any such restriction, anyway.)

Always remember: it’s only the good guys playing by the rules. There is no use in disallowing use of some software for cracking, is there?