Kosher for Passover software

[Herouth Maoz]

On 01/04/2010, at 07:40, Nadav Har'El wrote:

> How can software possibly contain chometz? And who eats software  
> anyway? :-)
> As it turns out, it's not just that you're not allowed to eat  
> chometz on
> Passover - you're not allowed even to "benefit" from it. Observant  
> jews
> already make sure that during Passover, their dogs eat kosher-for- 
> passover
> dogfood, their toilet paper is free of chometz, and the milk they  
> drink comes
> from cows that hadn't eaten chometz. The new decision is that using  
> software
> which benefited from chometz during Passover is disallowed. And how  
> can
> software possibly benefit from chometz? Easy - Napoleon once said that
> "the army marches on its stomache". Likewise, programmers eat, and  
> without
> food, there can be no software. If programmers ate chometz on  
> Passover,
> and you use this software, you're benefiting from chometz on Passover,
> which is not allowed.
>

Your rabbi must have drank the full four cups of wine of the Seder and  
added some VAT over that, before he made that decree, because,  
obviously, gentiles *are* allowed to eat as much chometz as they wish.  
That's why the local rabbinates sell all of the chometz within their  
jurisdiction to a friendly Muslim before Passover.

> Here in the Israeli software industry we're in a unique position to  
> produce
> kosher-for-passover software, because most of our programmers eat only
> kosher-for-passover food during passover. If we only make sure not to
> accidentally mix-in pieces of chometz software into our kosher  
> software.

In fact, since Israel has an overwhelming majority of Jews, out of  
which many are - oy vey - secular, Israeli software is highly likely  
to be non-kosher according to your inebriated rabbi.

> We should especially avoid free software - because much of it was  
> written by
> gentiles who eat bread during Passover!

It's much more likely that software written by complete gentiles will  
be entirely kosher. However, we should carefully trace the authors of  
every piece of code, SCO-style, and find out whether they are Jews,  
and if they are, whether they ate any chometz during passover. If they  
are gentile, all the better.

So, the question whether free or non-free software is better for  
Passover is in fact a serious Halachaic problem. On the one hand, this  
is the feast of freedom, and enslaved software should be avoided. Then  
again, commercial software is comparable to a cathedral while free  
software to a bazaar. And since when is a cathedral kosher? Also, free  
software's code is a lot easier to trace to individual authors. On the  
other hand, it's easier to make commercial software kosher, by selling  
it to a gentile for the duration of Passover. Bill Gates, for  
example,  can claim that all the food eaten at MSFT headquarters  
belongs to him anyway, and therefore, because he is a gentile, his  
operation is totally kosher. Apple is a little less lucky, because  
rumour has it that Steve Jobs is partly Jewish. Oy.

But you can't sell free software to anybody. So if there were any  
Jewish programmers who ate chometz and worked on it, the code should  
be removed, and patched over either by observant Jews or by full  
blooded gentiles.

Herouth
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