A closer real-world analogy is "is it unethical for john deere to sell a tractor that you're not able to service due to artificial restrictions". But the McDon

A closer real-world analogy is "is it unethical for john deere to sell a tractor that you're not able to service due to artificial restrictions". But the McDonalds one sorta holds up too. Let's examine the 4 freedoms: 1. Freedom to eat the food you purchased using any utensils (freedom 0) 2. Freedom to modify the food (i.e. add ketchup or hot sauce) and study it (investigate the ingredients in it, i.e. ask how much sodium is in it, or if the oil it was cooked in was meat oil). 3. Freedom to share an unmodified piece of the food with others (give a friend some fries) 4. Freedom to share the food, even if you've modified it or attempted to copy it (give your friend fries with ketchup on it, freedom to share your home-made fries modeled after McDs with a friend). It's arguable if "provide the recipe" needs to be included in those freedoms. Maybe. Either way, I'd argue that yes, it's unethical for macdonalds to sell you food without at the very least giving you the above freedoms, and also telling you all important ingredients in it (allergens and nutritional info, etc) The reason people aren't complaining about freedom wrt food is because the freedoms are already mostly there. Software licensing commonly requires things like "you can't use this software without an active internet connection to verify you purchased it", or "you can't install it on two computers". I've yet to find a food that has a limitation of "you can only eat this food if you're on the phone with us so we can verify you're not putting ketchup on it". If food was restricted in the same ways software is, I would call it unethical, yes. Selling mystery food with no ingredient list, that I'm not allowed to attempt to make my own variant of, that I can't add any additional ingredients to, and that I can't eat at my leisure.. yeah, that would be either unethical or a form of performance art.