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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

> One could make a very well-founded argument, for example, that Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and even EA or Comcast are not, strictly speaking, "evil" companies.

I'll venture to say this is the case. Most tech firms are small-fries when it comes to evil.

Cargill, Monsanto, and pretty much any oil company - now that's serious evil. And that's just in recent history. We're not even talking the East India Trading company.

Wake me when a tech firm profits billions through sweetheart contracts on an unjustifiable war or, through ineptitude or malevolence, kills tens of thousands in an industrial disaster.

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That's exactly my point. With a directive like "don't be evil" there's so very much wiggle room. If google spends the rest of its life hovering at a level above Exxon or even the East India Trading Company it might consider its "don't be evil" goal satisfied, but that's a pretty frightening future to imagine.

The problem with "don't be evil" is that it sets up the company to look hypocritical when it does something that could be construed as evil (or at least ambiguous).

Just like "it just works" for Apple - really super awesome, except when it doesn't - for large groups of their customers.

People may disagree on what's evil (especially when media companies can easily be "hired" to muddy the waters). Hypocrisy is much easier to detect and justifiably besmirches the brand value.

"Don't be evil" is equivalent to a guy walking around with a badge tht says "not a rapist"

Are you sure Monsanto is evil? As far as I understand, contrary to popular belief they only sue farmers who use their patented seeds if they also buy the pesticide that goes along with those seeds. Maybe they're evil for some other reason I'm not aware of?

Look into their role in the Agent Orange poisoning of Vietnam during the war. If that's not evil then the word has no meaning.

Are you kidding?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/13/genetically-modifie...

http://www.pressherald.com/news/Appeal-set-January-organic-f...

The latter is just evil. Suing farmers cause crops were contaminated through unwanted pollination by neighboring farms [using Monsanto's genetically altered seeds and chemicals]. Finally the farmers are banning together and counter-suing.

And this are just 2 examples. Do further searching and you'll find many more cases going back decades.

> The latter is just evil. Suing farmers cause crops were contaminated through unwanted pollination by neighboring farms

I already acknowledged that this view exists in the comment you replied to. However, I suspect this view stems from farmers talking to the press, and not from the careful reading of court records. See for example this quote from your second link:

> The judge also called the farmers' claims that they could be subject to patent-infringement lawsuits "unsubstantiated" because "not one single plaintiff claims to have been so threatened."

The Wikipedia article on Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser does mention that he was convicted without having used the pesticide, but the court did not believe the contamination was accidental in any case.

Intentional contamination or no, patenting genes and extorting royalties from people propagating self-replicating organisms is very much evil.

If farmers want to pay for seed stock of known features and quality, that's great. What they do after that should be totally under their control and domain. A legal precedent for interfering with the ancient practice of saving seed and selection of seeds from desirable plants is so entirely "evil" I can't explain it to someone who doesn't "get" it already. The evilness or any corporate control of genetics in the wild (outside of their production labs) should be self-evident.

I laugh at the audacity of garden catalogs that warn that you cannot take cuttings of certain patented items, like thornless blackberries. Blackberries are stupid-easy to propagate with cuttings, and it is completely absurd to think that people will (or should) obey such a warning.

> A legal precedent for interfering with the ancient practice of saving seed and selection of seeds from desirable plants [...]

This seems deliberately vague, and covers a lot of scenarios not covered by any court ruling I have seen. If you're going to call them evil, you need to do it with some specificity.

If you're proposing that we abolish GMO patents, I'd say that's a reckless policy that risks cutting off the funding source for increasingly important GMO research. There's probably going to be a couple billion more people on this planet, so it seems that we need better farming yields. Your arguments against the law seem to be on the form "the law is easy to break, hence it should not exist", which I think would apply to way too many laws to be a viable argument. If the law was hard to avoid breaking, I would agree more.

On the other hand, I agree that Monsanto's production of chemical weapons for the US government during the Vietnam war was probably evil.

Go earn you Monsanto pay elsewhere. This isn't reddit, we're not falling for your bullshit here.

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