Moral lessons from free software and GNU Emacs
It&#x27;s a good talk. The only quibble I have with it is the older I get, the less patience I have with this:<p>&gt; Never mistake conformism or obedience with virtue<p>I would tweak it to say &quot;Don&#x27;t rely on conformism if you will gain more with autonomy.&quot; But that&#x27;s the kicker; most users <i>won&#x27;t.</i> Microsoft and Apple are trillion-dollar companies not because they&#x27;ve tricked people into using their ecosystems, but because those ecosystems solve most people&#x27;s problems most of the time without a lot of thought.<p>The kind of person that slings emacs around for fun probably won&#x27;t flourish lashed to Apple&#x27;s mast. But most people care more about the destination than the journey for their computing, and for them, I&#x27;d recommend one of the two big OS vendors over trying to self-maintain a GNU&#x2F;Linux desktop ecosystem 99 out of 100 times. What the author calls &quot;fake comforts&quot; they just call &quot;comforts.&quot;