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Regarding the food comparison: Coca Cola is not behaving unethically by protecting their secret recipe. They have a responsibility to share allergen and nutriti
by ridiculous_fish 14y ago
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).
- mrsteveman1 14y agoI 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.