Comment by throwaway613834
8 years ago
My surprise wasn't at the fact that someone would give up money due to morals; my surprise was at the fact that helping Microsoft (or putting ads in software, in VLC's case) would be considered a moral wrong. That sounds like quite an exaggeration to me. Microsoft has done a lot of good things too, and so have ads. The fact that they have negative aspects doesn't mean anything less than 90 degrees away from their direction is a moral wrong.
In VLC's case, it's a question of trust. The users of VLC trust the developer to not put ads on that software; it's breaking that trust that would be the moral wrong, not necessarily the ads.
I don't understand what notion of trust this is. If it auto-updates, maybe? But if you make the change clear before they update I don't see where there's a breach of trust.