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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

> where do morals come into play here?

I want to be able to check whether the software does anything harmful for me, and to be able to fix it and adapt it to my needs. Proprietary software effectively curtails the possibility of doing that.

Say I am allergic to nuts. Fortunately, when I buy some processed food I can check easily whether it has nuts or not. Now imagine living in a world where food makers sneakily put nuts in their products, in order to "enhance the user experience". And not only that, but they took great efforts to hide this information from the consumers. After all, most people are not allergic, so no big deal here. I would say that this is immoral.

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> Now imagine living in a world where food makers sneakily put nuts in their products

Sure, this would be morally wrong (and also illegal). But you are basically saying that everyone is putting peanuts in their software, which is simply false. Quite insulting to those of us that do work on proprietary software.

So please tell us honestly. Do you include _any_ kind of monitoring in your software to track your user's actions, errors, etc?

You have to at least understand that (some) people have a trust issue with proprietary software, since too many vendors (including Canonical btw) ship with monitoring included.

> But you are basically saying that everyone is putting peanuts in their software, which is simply false.

An easy way to prove that is indeed publishing your code and letting the users compile it themselves. You can still hide your peanuts, but if somebody finds them, you'll have a hard time proving it was not there.

I see no difference between the two cases. As per your suggestion, it would seem reasonable to make proprietary software illegal after all.

Putting peanuts/analytics is pretty much a standard practice these days for most proprietary projects and even some FLOSS ones (where at least you can remove it by yourself).

I don't see where they said "everyone". The fact that anyone does that is cause for concern.

It's great that you don't include malicious code in your proprietary software. But why should you defend the right of others to do so? It's not really "insulting" to note that this is a common occurrence.

As you note, it is illegal for food manufacturers to put anything secret in food, let alone secret and harmful. Why tolerate it in software?

> As you note, it is illegal for food manufacturers to put anything secret in food, let alone secret and harmful. Why tolerate it in software?

We don't enforce laws against food manufacturers putting secret ingredients in food by opening up food production processes so that any member of the public can walk into the factory and watch them at work. A major reason for that is that the FDA is bound by law to respect trade secrets, so it can't just make public every detail of the food production processes it inspects; all it can say is whether or not they are safe in the FDA's judgment.

If we wanted to make laws against putting secret ingredients in software, the enforcement mechanism analogous to the one we use for food safety laws would be to create a huge government agency that inspected software source code. It wouldn't be to open up the source code to anyone who wants to see it.

We do require food manufacturers to 'open up' their production processes by printing every single ingredient on the packaging, plus a comprehensive review of the effects of the food on the body in the form of nutrition facts, caffeine content, alcohol content and allergen content among other things. Quite what the equivalent procedure for software would be is left as an exercise for the reader, but it's not as simple as 'government says so'.

The trouble is that the effects of harmful software are much less obvious than harmful food.

Yes, both of these are fair points. The second one, in particular, seems like an important difference between the two.

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