we really do not want to engineer a system in which using bugs to make money is considered economically legitimate activity. It is still crime. The main reason to report bugs and get the bounties for doing so is still because it makes the world safer and healthier. The money is there to make is to incentivize the work of finding and reporting them -- not to outbid the bad actors.
I would say that maintaining legacy systems as a software engineer is effectively "using bugs to make money" and very much an "economically legitimate activity".
If old systems had no bugs/issues, companies could do without the maintenance burden altogether (which includes even systems not being evolved/extended).
Companies sometimes reward their employees with important bug fixes. When I worked on a big dev team, we'd even decide what were the most important fixes and give people a special 5k bonus or something.
But they weren't security issues necessarily. I never thought about it, fixing a huge performance issue is big. A security fix that gets caught early makes no noise so you just don't know how important it would have been. We also once had a really terrible bug that lead to lots of customers getting effectively attacked.
It's one thing to hold something for ransom ("give me $5M or I release the 0day"). It's another to sell a valuable piece of information ("give me $5M if you want the 0day"). As long as you're only offering the bug to the company who would be impacted by its release, there's nothing unethical about asking for payment.
Maybe you think that, ethically, all bugs should be reported, regardless of payment, because it prevents harm. Well a lot of things prevent harm that we don't all take it upon ourselves to do voluntarily. Should everyone do all safety-related work for free? If we don't want to do it for free, should we not do safety work at all?
If the company really wanted it safe, and they can't make it safe themselves, they can pay someone else to make it safe. If they aren't willing to do that, then nobody is obligated to do free work for them, because we don't require anyone else to do safety-critical work for free. Let's not forget, this isn't a scrappy startup struggling for a seed round, this is one of the world's largest corporations with billions of dollars in cash. If they want your labor, make them pay for it.
"Crime" is very flexible term. One country's criminal is another country hero. Maybe the author would sell the vulnerability to an organization making exploits for government use.
"Safety" is also a relative thing, when the world is safer for one party, it is usually worse for another.
As our surroundings grow more secure, the justice system variant of swatting becomes a greater portion of the threats to worry about. There will be abuseable bugs and situations in our non static world, there is no way we'll ever have perfect security of anything. So a motivated actor with a grudge should be able to plant something a place you provably beyond reasonable doubt have sole control of, given enough time. How do you propose then that we secure deniability once the justice system is wielded as a weapon against the innocent, when everyone feels that there is no reasonable way defects exist and could have been used? Just look at the British post office scandal, real world justice systems have already operated under the assumption that software doesn't have bugs for decades, which speaks volumes on their inclination to believe that they both exist and are used by a unknown third party with ill intent. Thus the widespread trust in that things are secure is a threat in itself. And unlike airports we don't need the users to have an artificial sense of security for computers, networks, software, and digital services to be viable markets.
Brain dead moral relativism argument. The question is whether eg. a group trying to scam elders out of insurance money or a Columbian cartel to hack local politicians to do blackmail, or South Sudan to hack Darfur or whatever, should be allowed to compete with the companies making products for their own exploits.
99.999% of people will agree that reducing software vulnerabilities is desirable if they're able to understand the question, including the bad actors themselves a lot of the times.
The situations like bad state actors are already not bound by laws, and things like keeping activism legal are better fought for through other ways
