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Comment by gilrain | Hacker News Reader

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He sold a piece of software he wrote. It's something totally legit that happens all the time.

And we don't know if the new owner changed anything or if anybody at all got hurt by that. We do know you rudely insulted the parent, however.

This is what I'd say about someone who sold their extension today, but I don't think this business model was nearly as well-known 15 years ago.

How were they supposed to know that was going to happen? You think they walked up and said, “Hi. I’m here to buy your software and hurt people with it”?

If a stranger walks up to the chef in a restaurant and offers to pay them to put some mystery stuff in the food, or someone walks up in during a surgery and asks if they can make some incisions and inject some mystery stuff, would you (as a customer of the restaurant or hospital) expect this to be allowed?

If someone walks up to the owner in a restaurant and offers to pay them money to buy the restaurant, it's not considered suspicious.

Assuming the someone is private equity buying out, I expect the quality to drop like a stone and the place to go to hell.

So. It's not suspicious. But you can rest assured as a customer it isn't good news

(that doesn't make it wrong to sell ofc)

That isn’t remotely comparable. You’re asking someone to quietly alter someone else’s product, not selling the product to them. They didn’t pay him to change the extension, they bought it.

They bought the permission to make changes to customer machines that had been granted to the seller by the customer. If it's just a sale of the source code, there's no problem. But what is bought is usually the pre-existing update channel (the installed base), precisely to be able to alter the product for existing users without explicitly informing them or asking for consent.

I get what you’re trying to say but comparing selling your tool to pocketing money on the job to commit a crime is not the same thing.

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