I don't think that's their position actually, only that it's unethical to sell someone software they have no control over and no legal right to alter or work to understand, particularly if the software is actively undermining the user in various ways as DRM would.
It's a black box so to speak. Someone else pointed out the food comparison, it would in fact be unethical to sell someone food without telling them how it was produced and what was in it, and I think that's a reasonable take on the software situation.
However, one could argue that the GPL makes it almost impossible to build a traditional software sales business if the product is GPL licensed. The first person who buys it gains a legal exception to copyright to give it out freely, but that happens whether its GPL licensed or proprietary, we just call it piracy in the latter case.
So in some respect they're working against the idea of traditional software sales as a side effect of upholding the freedoms they promote.
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).
I 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.
It's a black box so to speak. Someone else pointed out the food comparison, it would in fact be unethical to sell someone food without telling them how it was produced and what was in it, and I think that's a reasonable take on the software situation.
However, one could argue that the GPL makes it almost impossible to build a traditional software sales business if the product is GPL licensed. The first person who buys it gains a legal exception to copyright to give it out freely, but that happens whether its GPL licensed or proprietary, we just call it piracy in the latter case.
So in some respect they're working against the idea of traditional software sales as a side effect of upholding the freedoms they promote.