Are you really saying that people should avoid writing software that could help people who are subject to evil regimes because said evil regime might be upset at them?
No, I'm saying that "my software helps people who are subject to evil regimes" is approximately as irresponsible as "my homeopathic remedy solves cancer" except in this case cancer has essentially infinite computational resources, arbitrarily high numbers of very savvy domain experts, and an army. Any hacker who believes their software, or their community's software, will hold up to dedicated adversarial interest from a nation-state is dangerously delusional.
I don't think it's as simple as you make it sound.
If somebody writes a tool that helps 100 million Chinese people access the unfiltered internet, a percentage of them will be caught and punished in devastating and inhumane ways. Some fraction of the illicit traffic will be blocked and the holes sealed up.
The remaining people will have access to material that, as far as the Chinese government is concerned, poses a tremendous risk to the state's continued authority. If this - as the state obviously believes - would help speed along the atrophy of an authoritarian state, net human suffering would be reduced overall.
I see what you mean and mostly agree but not with the example you chose: Chinese government never intended to completely block sensitive content. If they wanted so they would use other technologies. Any Chinese netizen with a VPN can go outside and many of them do. What the Chinese government do, successfully, is to make the sensitive content slightly harder to access, compared to local "safe" content. Then, like the water choosing the downward slope, most information consumed by Chinese netizens is inside the GFW.
No, I'm saying that "my software helps people who are subject to evil regimes" is approximately as irresponsible as "my homeopathic remedy solves cancer" except in this case cancer has essentially infinite computational resources, arbitrarily high numbers of very savvy domain experts, and an army. Any hacker who believes their software, or their community's software, will hold up to dedicated adversarial interest from a nation-state is dangerously delusional.