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Comment by antidoh | Hacker News Reader

Why is it unethical to sell software, but (I presume) it's ethical to sell food?

Free as in speech, not free as in beer, etc. It's not particularly ethical to sell food and refuse to tell anyone what's in the food, which is why we have various laws regarding that. Nor does it seem particularly reasonable to sell someone food under the condition that if they eat it in particular ways, you'll sue them.

While I understand this concept, is it not another consideration that people should receive compensation for their work? In most areas these two goals don't seem to conflict with one another, but in software they seem to, at least a bit, and I don't think I've ever seen something from rms or the fsf addressing this notion. Even if RMS's position is "Freedom is _absolutely_ uncompromisable in any form whatsoever, and the need for freedom takes complete precedence over the ability for people to receive payment for software", I'd like to hear him say that (unless he has and I've never come across it).

I don't think Valve is being unethical in protecting their games. They're not controlling their products because "fuck you consumers, we are evil and wish to suppress your rights", they're doing it (at least I presume) because if they didn't, no one would buy their games and they wouldn't be able to operate. A food vendor can't make a similar claim (well, at least not in as strong a way -- though I guess there are things like secret recipes) to justify hiding things from consumers.

Whenever rms has been asked this question he has 2 answers.

1) Custom software development (i.e bespoke client work) and 2) Crowdsourcing

The custom software argument seems odd, even though the main user (the client) would get the source code and freedom in that instance not only does it promote keeping software locked away as trade secrets, in most cases the actual end users will not get freedom with the software it will really just be senior management.

Wait, how does crowdsourcing make money?

Actually, there's another element to growing food you missed: industrial agriculture companies actually have "closed source" seeds. Scientists muck with the genetics of the plant, and one effect is that a farmer can no longer glean seeds for their next crop--they are forced to purchase more from the supplier. Some people may not find that to particularly ethical, either.

I don't think that's their position actually, only that it's unethical to sell someone software they have no control over and no legal right to alter or work to understand, particularly if the software is actively undermining the user in various ways as DRM would.

It's a black box so to speak. Someone else pointed out the food comparison, it would in fact be unethical to sell someone food without telling them how it was produced and what was in it, and I think that's a reasonable take on the software situation.

However, one could argue that the GPL makes it almost impossible to build a traditional software sales business if the product is GPL licensed. The first person who buys it gains a legal exception to copyright to give it out freely, but that happens whether its GPL licensed or proprietary, we just call it piracy in the latter case.

So in some respect they're working against the idea of traditional software sales as a side effect of upholding the freedoms they promote.

Regarding the food comparison: Coca Cola is not behaving unethically by protecting their secret recipe. They have a responsibility to share allergen and nutritional information, but they have no obligation to provide sufficient information to reproduce their product.

Extending the analogy to software, if your program accesses personal information, contacts remote servers, inserts itself into the kernel, etc. then you have an ethical obligation to publish that behavior. But there's no ethical obligation to provide the source code, and indeed, providing the source code wouldn't be sufficient to satisfy your other obligations (because it wouldn't be accessible to 99% of users).

I actually think food is in a unique position where divulging every last ingredient is the only ethical way to do it. They may only have a current legal obligation to disclose known allergens, but that changes, we discover food sensitivities and reactions after things have been in wide use for long periods of time. Trusting the company and the regulatory bodies isn't enough with food.

If that means someone else can come along and reproduce it, tough.

See here for more information on the distinction between free (gratis) vs free (libre) as it relates to software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre

It is not unethical to sell software, but software and other digital things at the core is a set of easily copiable bits, while food isn't, and it takes food to write software.

I believe that it is unethical to knowingly sell something that is harmful.

At the core of food are plants that have a set of easily copiable and modifiable DNA. Apparently, biotech corps think that they have DRM on plants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...

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