The Unofficial Mac Weblog posted an article about MacUpdate advertising their bundle containing Parallels under their listing for VMware Fusion. There’s a lot of discussion in the comments about whether or not this ethical. I think that it is rather unethical and, frankly, completely inappropriate. I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain why it’s wrong from a developer’s point of view. Let me first say that there’s a very large difference between being business savvy and being ethical. Many of the commenters note that there’s nothing wrong with MacUpdate trying to sell bundles on their site and that it’s just good business to try to get more people to buy their product. This is not the issue. Good business is not necessarily good ethics. I don’t have a problem with MacUpdate putting a general banner or link to their bundle on every page but I do have a problem with them targeting specific applications to funnel people away from a product.

The problem is precisely that MacUpdate does not generate their own content. Instead, the content is generated by developers like me. They post information that is received from various sources but hardly do any work themselves. One might argue that developers opt in to this program and therefore can’t complain. That isn’t entirely true. When I released Paperclip, I did not submit it to MacUpdate. They created the listing for Paperclip entirely on their own. They also did an awful job of it. Sure, I generated a press release, but instead of using copy from the release, MacUpdate came up with a one-line descriptor for Paperclip that was hardly satisfying. I didn’t ask them directly to put it on their site but now I have to maintain it to keep the information correct. That’s a bit of a problem as I can’t trust them to adequately collect information on their own.

I said that to say this: MacUpdate purports to offer a service to developers and to potential software users. However, this service doesn’t necessarily always benefit developers. They actively seek out other people’s content in order to improve their ability to sell advertising (and now software bundles) to users. I would be greatly offended if they added a Paperclip page without my approval so that they could funnel people to their own product.

But, to make it a bit more general, the tacit understanding between developers and these aggregation sites is that we provide content to them with the notion that it benefits us both. MacUpdate gets to sell advertising and developers have the opportunity to catch some potential sales. When MacUpdate diverts these sales to their own bundle, the developer is getting screwed. They have provided the content but do not receive the implied benefits.

This is what many people are confused about. They mistake the term “legal” for “ethical.” What MacUpdate has done is entirely legal. It may also boost sales of their bundle which would be good marketing. However, it breaks the communal ethic. It screws over a developer.

A lot of the commenters on TUAW mention that providing this “editorial” by no means costs MacUpdate its credibility. That’s completely bogus. MacUpdate has lost a great deal of credibility with me and, I suspect, a portion of the developer community.