That's cool... but does an individual's right to choose not to consume make the company's right to exist and operate moot? Does an opinion not based in current facts surrounding the company make the company evil?
Pardon me, but it s a known fact that I have trust issues (I don't believe in 3 strikes and you'd be lucky if you were allowed 2), so help me out here...
When does a current fact stop being current and become old news, worthy of forgetting? If they do something seriously questionable today, do we immediately forgive and forget tomorrow, if they stop, change the way they do things, apologize, make promises, etc?
Where do YOU draw the line? At what point do you say enough is enough and now I am not going to trust you until you have proven yourselves worthy of that trust? How long does it take to win that trust back? How many infractions are they allowed during that period? How serious are those infractions allowed to be? At what point do you write them off and never trust again?
These were not just employees of DivX that were being paid to just do their job and the company made them do stuff that they didn't feel good about, so they quit.
No, these guys were very involved at a high level. It was because of them that the spyware was bundled into DivX...it was their idea and they stood behind it 100% without losing a wink of sleep.
They took what they learned while at DivX and started Open Candy to do the same, but instead of bundling it in their own software, they will get developers to bundle it in their software. And at first they will look like the good guys, sweet talking, smooth, and convincing open source and freeware developers that they are the good guys (meanwhile they keep getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar, pulling their hand out and saying "look, see, no cookie, I'm not doing anything wrong") And little by little they change the way people think about adware and spyware, redefining it, pushing the envelope until what they did at DivX is completely acceptable by the public as something wonderful. Then they can take freely from the cookie jar and say "it's only cookies, and we are only taking a few, and we are sharing them with others that deserve some too."
Because if they can get you to swallow a tiny bit of BS and make you like it, it will be that much easier to get you to swallow more and more till you live on a diet entirely of BS, and like it. And since they are going after the mainstream, you are going to end up with a McBS on every corner before too long.
A lot of that was back in 2002/2003. The Internet was much less mature then. There was a lot more experimenting.
You could say that about 1999, but not 2002/2003.
But I think a lot of lessons were learned from a lot of mistakes in the earlier years of the Internet. It's fine to look back and see mistakes with 20/20 hindsight, but... Anyways... I'm going to drop it. I really don't care much about dwelling on ancient history. It has its lessons.
Those that do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. There was a time when things like Gator, CometCursors, Gozilla, and the CueCat (a company I really
wish did things right) were cool, just like OpenCandy seems to some to be cool today.