The obligation you're not living up to is to HN, not to Microsoft. If you want to participate here, the onus is on you not to be knee-jerk; avoiding knee-jerkism is the subtext of like 3/4 of the site guidelines.
This is veering to the meta, however, one of the best things came out of my HN experience is how to converse and discuss better. Actually I strive hard to not to be a knee-jerk person. I always take my time while writing something and try to back-up with actual events and/or facts.
The point I was trying to make that for companies like Microsoft, reaching for the pitchfork is not always a knee-jerk reaction IMHO. For all the things they have done, my initial reaction is always Oof, not again..., which is actually sad for a company of this size.
It's actually unfathomable to me for a company like Microsoft to not test these flows adequately and allowing this to happen.
For a change, I want to see a more open computing platform, a less intrusive Windows version, or a longer maintenance window for CentOS, but we all have is a brawl.
One big clue you have that the reactions here were knee-jerk is that they all turned out to be totally wrong. There's a lot of corncob dot gif happening in the aftermath.
I'm glad that my assumption proven to be wrong, by Microsoft itself, nonetheless. However, is being wrong is always equal to being a knee-jerk? Does the reputation of the company in question doesn't play a role here?
Or, shall we be stateless, and evaluate every events without any prior experience? I don't think that holds a lot of water in real world, either.
Another clue that it's knee-jerkism is that the accusations make no sense. It's hard to see what Microsoft plausibly stood to gain by modifying an MIT license. I suspect a lot of the accusations here are being made by people who simply don't know what an MIT license means. For that matter: even with a restrictive license like the GPL, it's hard to make sense of this as a heist, especially since it's right there in the public git log.
I don't think it's going to be possible to salvage the torch and pitchfork comments on this thread. For lack of a better way to put it: they're pretty dumb.
> It's hard to see what Microsoft plausibly stood to gain by modifying an MIT license.
Actually, not being able to find a plausible gain in five minutes doesn't automatically clear Microsoft (or any company) in my mind. From top of my head, I can list three technologies which I find suspicious in the long run: LSP, WSL, SecureBoot.
All in all, I just don't trust Microsoft, and think about the worst of their actions first. They're the only company (ORACLE being a firm second) which evoke this reaction for me, and this their own making over the years.
Just because I don't trust a company and assume the worst of them, and telling this openly makes me a knee-jerk person, so be it.
As I said, I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I refuse to be stateless, and look every action of this company with completely neutral eyes.
If you don't have anything well-considered to say about an event on HN, the best thing to do is not to say anything at all. Believe it or not, your personal distrust of a giant company isn't all that interesting to the rest of HN.
I think what he has to say is well-considered, and interesting. Meanwhile, the fact that you consider yourself qualified to speak for "the rest of HN" is... deeply fascinating.
I’m sure you meant to qualify that statement to say it is deeply interesting to you, rather than imply that your assessment of the interestingness is somehow objective or represents what other people think.
