<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On 01/04/2010, at 07:40, Nadav Har'El wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; ">How can software possibly contain chometz? And who eats software anyway? :-)<br>As it turns out, it's not just that you're not allowed to eat chometz on<br>Passover - you're not allowed even to "benefit" from it. Observant jews<br>already make sure that during Passover, their dogs eat kosher-for-passover<br>dogfood, their toilet paper is free of chometz, and the milk they drink comes<br>from cows that hadn't eaten chometz. The new decision is that using software<br>which benefited from chometz during Passover is disallowed. And how can<br>software possibly benefit from chometz? Easy - Napoleon once said that<br>"the army marches on its stomache". Likewise, programmers eat, and without<br>food, there can be no software. If programmers ate chometz on Passover,<br>and you use this software, you're benefiting from chometz on Passover,<br>which is not allowed.<br><br></span></blockquote><div><br></div>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.</div><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; ">Here in the Israeli software industry we're in a unique position to produce<br>kosher-for-passover software, because most of our programmers eat only<br>kosher-for-passover food during passover. If we only make sure not to<br>accidentally mix-in pieces of chometz software into our kosher software.<br></span></blockquote><div><br></div>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.</div><div><br></div><div><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; ">We should especially avoid free software - because much of it was written by<br>gentiles who eat bread during Passover!</span></blockquote></div><br><div><div style="direction: ltr;">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.</div><div style="direction: ltr;"><br></div><div style="direction: ltr;">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.</div><div style="direction: ltr;"><br></div><div style="direction: ltr;">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. </div><div style="direction: ltr;"><br></div><div style="direction: ltr;">Herouth</div></div></body></html>