The article explains it as a fork that just blindly copies the changes in the original source to avoid legal complications but not add any new technical value.
I get the opposition to corporate branding in public spaces. But there’s also the complaint that corporations don’t contribute to the public good. I’m guessing David Teare didn’t want it named after him. You could have it named after a significant historical local figure but that still doesn’t address the issue of how to foster goodwill by demonstrating your company acts in ways that benefits the public good.
The beauty of this is that everyone in that room recognized the utility and the accessibility that the Mac provided. Contrast that to today’s demonstrations; many of today’s advancements are so technical and specialized that most users feel like they need to be experts to access those features. When I see MacPaint, I know how things work. I don’t have to lookup what Gaussian blur is.
* Abortion is an issue that transcends labels like "pro-life" and "pro-choice". We ought to look at the issue as having a spectrum of positions (and most people would nuance their position beyond these labels).
* "My body, my choice" seems woefully inadequate here. The individual's body doesn't belong to the state, but having personal autonomy be the highest value doesn't work very well in a pandemic.
* China had a ban on gender preference which was exacerbated by the one-child policy (where there was evidence in some places of forced abortions). A policy that is/was so effective that even with the government encouraging couples to have two children, many are choosing not to because of economic and cultural values.
Are we assuming that parents have no oversight over their children’s devices? This seems like a social problem (ie family relations/management) rather than a technology/legal one.
The ubiquity of this issue really points to a deeper, admittedly unsolvable issue: morality is not a shared value of significance. Every discussion of security assumes that the primary threat is a purposely malicious actor, not an accident prone one. I understand that people see the shared morality issue as an unsolvable one which is why we try to solve the problem at the software/hardware level. But that looks unsolvable too (as per the article).
I’ve looked at some of the Copilot threads but am unable to follow the issue. Can someone summarize what the issue is with Copilot and why a BSD license would have been significant for the code?
What's interesting to me is that the discussion so far has emphasized: security and freedom. It's clear that consumers care very little about these two ideas in the ways that the technological elite (i.e. HN) do. If I don't understand a technology and don't have an interest in doing so, I certainly don't want to manage it. So the values that these "uncomfortable questions" raise are irrelevant.
The way the average consumer views "security" is: "Is this a trusted brand?". As of today Microsoft and Amazon are trusted brands. Western Digital not so much. So instead of trying to understand how Windows 11 running wrapped Amazon Store Android executables might be insecure, users see the words "Microsoft" and "Amazon" and feel secure. (as a side note, security is really just a feeling anyways...)
With regard to freedom, what's freeing to the common consumer is the freedom to have access to functionality they care about. They don't care that someone else is tracking them or that they are limited to apps on these stores.
So, really, these uncomfortable questions are only uncomfortable for people who aren't the target audience of this feature.
That's not my point. Yes, someone poor benefits greatly from a dollar store, but they're paying a premium that someone that is more wealthy does not pay because the wealthy person can take advantage of economies of scale: a wealthy person can buy 100 rolls of toilet paper for $50 where a poor person can only buy one roll for $1.
This extends beyond just the dollar store. A wealthy person has access to a vehicle which allows them to go to Costco that is 10 km away. A wealthy person has storage in their home to house the discounted goods they buy. A wealthy person has access to financing and financial investments that a poor person does not; you cannot buy a portion of share of stock.
https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/IMG_4148-1.jpe...