This is often the case in the capitalist corporate environment, where you should align your motives along the direction set by the CEO. If you can't do that (whatever the reason), you won't feel happy at work.
Now of course, in a capitalist corporate setting there are a lot of reasons why you may not be able to align your motives to that of the CEO, for obvious and less obvious reasons. Books are written about that.
See for example:
- Capitalisme, désir et servitude (2010) Frédéric Lordon
- L'être contre l'avoir (2012) Francis Cousin
Essentially, corporations are there to make money for the C*O and for the shareholders. Anything else is purely accidental and out of their real scope. This can indeed leave a sense of void.
You may try to find a corporation that has a real purpose, like, put a colony on Mars, or develop fusion energy. But as soon as they start to show sign of success, they're eaten by capitalists that then change their purpose. A very good example of that is Apple, which started to become successful with the Macintosh, and then the capitalists took over, fired Steve Jobs, and lead Apple to the catastroph with eventually a capitalization of -400M, when NeXTcomputer Inc took it back. But since then nothing happened at Apple, but the accumulation of capital: all you're sold today has been developped at the early Apply Computer Inc. from Xerox PARC stuff and at NeXTcomputer Inc from stuff invented at various other places (Avi Tevanian invented Mach at Carnegie Mellon University, Brad Cox and Tom Love invented Objective C at their company Stepstone Inc, and Bernard Hulo invented Interface Builder (written in ExpertLisp) while at the INRIA).
There are almost no capitalist corporation where you can have a real purpose, and invent or develop new stuff, by necessity, because use of money as final decision maker. Cf. "law of averages" in Ainsi marchait l'humanité, Jean-François Geneste.
And the situation is rather hopeless, given the current state of academia and academic research too.
You might think that you can just work for the money, and then create happiness at home working on your own projects. But you would subestimate the soulsuckingness of corporations. Realize that you are much poorer than your grand parents or great grand parents: they had a land to cultivate and to live on. You probably don't. Before the industrial "revolution" and before the capitalists forbid people to use the communal terrains for their food production, people lived well working much less than now. We've been robben of our means of survival, and forced to work as slave in corporations. You need to find a way to free yourself from this system, and this means, you need to re-acquire the autonomous means to your survival; land, culture, livestock. Buy some cheap place with a garden to grow your own food. Add some solar panels and an Internet connection, and you'll be ready to work freely on your own projects.
http://www.amazon.fr/Capitalisme-d%C3%A9sir-servitude-Fr%C3%...
http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis-Cousin...
http://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/2756311030/ref=oss_product
(And sorry for the French book references, I know no English translations for them, and I know of no equivalent in English).
There is a game and there are rules of that game, and almost everybody adhere to those rules and play the game, winners or losers. Killing somebody, notably the rich, is a game move, and there are rules about it, like go to jail, don't get the $20,000.
The question you're asking is why don't the poor just stop playing the game? Even rich people realize the game is no fun, and the losers of that game have a hard time, and I guess, some of them wouldn't mind stopping the game.
The thing is that the game is rigged to ensure that you don't realize it's there, and to ensure that you run and run all the time to catch up, without time to stop and think about the game.
Really, the majority in the middle can't take the time to think about it, and they still think they can win! Or if not them, their children. Only a few winners and losers could realize that. The losers, if they realize it, before they die, they can't do anything about it anyways, having to work hard to survive. The winners, they can't du much about it either, even with all their money, because everybody else wants to play the game.
You could hope to try to change it thru education, but now it's obvious that education is rigged to maintain people in ignorance and have them keep running for the game. http://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE/?_encod...
You could hope to try to change it thru the political system, but now it's obvious that it is rigged by the winners to maintain a winning game for them. http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/tv_turnout.pdf http://home.bi.no/fag89001/TV.pdf
As mentionned in another answer, a revolt only lead to the reproduction of the game, with another set of winner (or often just the same), and this arguably comes from the fact that the formal rules are written down by the same set of people designated by the winners, instead of by the people doing the revolt. I'm talking here of the constitutions. So one way would be to educate people to teach them constitution writing so that they could write their own consititution next time they revolt, and not have the same bunch of goonies write it for the ex-winners so they can be the new winners again. But see the problem with education above. On the other hand, here is a little light, with the Internet, people could educate themselves. Learn about true democracy at http://le-message.org/?lang=en and write constitution articles with your friends!
But more than just the consitution and formal rules (laws) aspect to the game, it also exists in an informal way in the mind of people, culturally.
The notions that you have to work to survive, the notion of money (and how it has been transformed in the recent centuries by the banksters), have to be changed. It's true that for a long time scarcity made it rather difficult to envision those changes. And the winners know it, since they are even today sending propaganda about a so called "Earth Overshoot Day" and other bullshit like overpopulation and climate "change", http://www.footprintnetwork.org/ to program deeply into your mind the notion of scarcity.
http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis-Cousin...
Instead, people we have to free ourselves from this mind set, learn about alternatives, and prepare for a real "revolution", where we will be able finally to get rid of the psychopaths "winners" of games, and of any "game" that pits man against man. https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/ http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/
In the meantime, and pushed very hard by robotization and automation of enterprises, the establishment of a universal income, basic revenue, whatever you name it, should ease the transition and perhaps let us avoid a bloody revolt.
There's also another dimension to take into account, that the poor are actually not in the same country or even the same continent as the rich. Some of those poor, pushed by war (resulting directly or indirectly from the USA and Europe action!), are migrating "refuge" into our countries; thus they are getting closer to the "rich", but most of the time they just start to run to play the game, happy of being already richer or more alive than their cousins they left home. Fighting fewer wars, killing fewer "dictators", and instead having some kind of international cooperation that would transform those countries into something less than us as we are now or were in the past couple of centuries, but instead more like what we'll be in a few centuries, could greatly help with this. Instead of killing a dictator, installing Internet in his country ought to be much more efficient. Instead of accepting the Internet filters of China, India or UK, promiting a free Internet everywhere could make it easier to resolve poverty everywhere.
It's a higher level of consciousness to take into account the consequences of your acts and of your work.
Commercial developers just go as far as the money paid by their customers, and don't care what their software is used for.
Some commercial developers restrict some use of their software (but more for their own protection, because they know the limits of the "quality" of their products, than for moral reasons). For example, you're not allowed to use Apple software to develop nuclear power systems.
cf. https://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/MacOSX.htm
In addition, corporations under USA jurisdiction must restrict the use of their products to authorised countries only.If a country feels threatened by another country, it's understandable that it wish to avoid providing this other country with any help that would heighten the thread.
Similarly, if an individual feels threatened by another country or by other individuals, it's understandabel that we wish to avoid providing them with any help, most notably when it's in the form of gratis software.
Of course, this contradicts the ideal of free(dom) software.
But we have to take into account the circumstances, we don't live in an ideal world.
You have also to take into account the fact that you cannot in general control the application of your free software license. Those using BSD or MIT and similar license basically abandon all control on their software use and distribution (or non-distribution).
In the case of GPL, the copyright owner keeps control of the distribution if his software, under the terms of the license (which mandates the derived works authors to distribute the sources along with their derived works).
But in practice, GPL software owners don't have the means to control what corporations in the USA do with their software and whether they respect the terms of the license or not, and even if they detected license violations, they don't have the power to do anything about it. We're counting here more on the self discipline of the potential users of the software than on anything else, and this means that it can be abused easily.
Therefore beyond the restrictions the license may put on the use or users of the software, the questions of the distribution of free(dom) software itself must be considered, in each case.
It's probably better to distribute widely and indiscriminately software whose success is based on network effect. For example, things like GNU or Linux.
But for more specific software, one should ponder whether even its users wouldn't be better served by a more restricted distribution.
In practice, we know that most open source software is not read by a lot of people, and not used by a lot more either anyways.
Distributing the sources of the software you sell to your customers or give to your friend still seems to be a very important act of software freedom. Distributing it to the whole wide world, doesn't seem so important. The GPL itself clearly distringuishes this point: you can use, read and modify a GPL software, keeping your derived work entirely private, as long as you don't distribute it. This covers use of derived work inside some artificial boundaries (one would have to revise the legal definition of "distribution" IANAL), such as corporation, family, and why not friend circles. I think it can be argued that if you got diner at your friends' and install some derived work of some GPL software on his computer, this won't consitute a distribution. And while the GPL spirit would have you give your friend the sources of your derived work, nothing in the terms of that license imposes you to distribute them to the public at large.
The corporations are so greedy that in general they won't be using GPL software as the basis of their products (they may still use it internally, and this is questionable, as we've seen from the scandal of the openssl and bash bugs that remained undetected for decades); so this provides some indirect and implicit limitations on the distribution of GPL software. But we cannot depend on it.
I think the argument should be made for a more direct control, and given the current spirit of free software and the current terms of the GPL family of licenses, which doesn't distinguish human individuals from corporations and political (ie. armed) entities (eg. countries or "rebel" groups), the individual author of powerful tools should definitely consider and explicitely control the distribution of his works, instead of pushing it naively to the whole world.
Now, TreeFinder is not distributed under a free software license (the sources aren't distributed), but the new terms "I do no longer permit the usage of my TREEFINDER software in the following EU countries: [...]" restrict the execution of the software geographically. As a programmer, I understand that a program runs on some computer hardware that is localised geographically; the presence of a human user is optional, and therefore the location of this optional human user cannot be used to determine the geographical location of the "use" of the program. Only the position of the hardware running this program. Therefore, as a French citizen, currently present in France, and currently under the domination of the EU oligarchy, I could install this software on a server located in Cameroon and have it run there, in Africa. Honestly, this doesn't represent much of a restriction, and not even an inconvenience, I already routinely use computers located in different countries.
This restriction is not really effective to advance the goals of the author; the buzz around it does more. (And definitely, the publicity is nice, TreeFinder seems to be a nice program).
One could design better license terms.
To begin with, we would have to distinguish different entities, such as human beings, for-profit corporations, political entities, etc, and classify them on the wanted criteria (is, belongs, helps the oligarchy, or not). A human being who's salaried by a corporation who wants to have immigrants to lower the salary, shall he be discriminated against for working to that corporation? Or shall he be helped in his human endeavour? How will we distinguish use of the software at home, for personal purposes, from a use that would eventually benefit the corporation, and therefore lower his salary (and everybody else's)? We can assume that all employee of corporations making a profit, being willingly exploited and willingly contributing their share of the profit to the oligarchs are parts of the enemy, so they could be distriminated against. The point here is that there is some information available about the relationships between corporations, and with some parts of the political system, and some of those high up individuals, but you might need even more information, eg. about employees, about customers of free lances, etc.
http://theyrule.net/drupal/topics/watching%20them
http://api.littlesis.org/documentation
On the other hand, you may discover that everybody is enslaved and contributing. Why not exclude the Chinese? They definitely contribute to the decadence of Europe thru delocalizations. And why not the Africans who provide cheap minerals to the Chinese factories?
http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis-Cousin...