The way you worded this has me imagining the counterfactual world where lots of people traded Bill Gates a linker for a compiler.
Compilers cost real money back then. Word got out that this was how you got a free compiler. You just wrote a linker, and you got in touch with Bill and offered it to him. (You did have to write your linker in a single huge file of assembly, because you didn't have a compiler or a linker yet. It was fine, more programmers knew assembly back then.)
Microsoft has thousands of linkers. They're the linker company now.
Most of their other products started as test cases for their linkers, that they also happen to sell separately as a side business because why not.
Excel is a notable exception, because due to a series of overengineering decisions, it actually is a linker that gradually gained spreadsheet features.
For humans who are paying attention, sure. In practice, not really, because it's all done by scripts without an easy way to query "is this domain shared".
Let's rephrase then: why does owning stock imply financially supporting the company? After IPO, you're not buying anything from the company, you're buying from other investors.
The 50-character summary thing is bizarre. As far as I can tell, what happened is someone did statistics on summary lines, found that the average was around 50, and then louder people with strong opinions missed the word "average" and declared 50 as a maximum.
My hot take is that you should use exactly as many characters as you need to write a meaningful summary, and people who insist on using tiny terminal windows can deal with the consequences of their actions.
It's absolutely a spectrum, just like the individual conditions that make it up are spectra. (Everything is spectra. Is my friend who has arthritis in his otherwise working legs "physically disabled"? It depends on whether he's walking around a store or trying to run a marathon.)
"Neurotypical" here, when used as a binary adjective, means something like "close enough to the average on all the relevant spectra to not particularly benefit from special consideration". The exact line for where that is is going to be blurry and situationally dependent, because it's a shorthand for an approximation.
(I don't work at Github, these are inferences from working on other cloud services)
> Does this mean Github staff can basically take over any private account without contacting the owners?
That's an incredibly common feature to have on the admin side. Three of the four companies I've worked at have had some form of "log in as this user" button, with general guidance to not do anything dumb. The fourth had good reasons for not supporting that, but it made debugging anything happening in production incredibly annoying.
> Could they quietly manipulate my own repos by changing my ssh key and pushing commits?
They _literally own the servers_. They don't need your ssh key. Likely not _everyone_ has direct filesystem access, but at least a few people do.
By hosting anything on a cloud service, you are trusting the people running that service. If you don't trust them, don't do that.