Comment by solatic

I’d say in this case it’s fair for them (or anybody else in a similar position) to get some nonzero amount of negative press, just as a matter of disincentivising the behaviour in question. Putting out a fair nonzero quantity of negative press, though, is not something humanity has figured out—the amount of bashing one receives for doing something bad (in the same general class of bad things) is always fairly random.

Why should they get bashed at least some? Because, if we’re treating this strictly as marketing, the deal they proposed to OSS maintainers was, basically: you spend the effort of building things on top of our non-second-sourceable offering; we give you free use of said offering; you give us marketing in the form of homepage badges, procurement suggestions at your workplace, etc. No money changed hands and no contractual obligations were accepted by the provider, but this is still very much a deal, and the porting at the outset is effectively an advance.

So the harder it is to move away from the offering—the larger the advance—the more bashing is deserved. And Vercel is pretty hard to move away, from what I understand, certainly more so than, say, Travis CI.

(Also, that public press release is pretty much a lie in how it attempts to leave a very misleading impression using technically true statements, and I’m never not going to be bashing people or companies for lying or bullshitting. Yes, I know it’s very common and in many cases effectively a legal necessity, I’m still not going to stop.)

Should the other good things they’ve done mean they’re exempted from the bad press? Ideally, no: the only way to have an adequate picture of a thing is to have a fair sample of its good and bad things. Biasing the sample by hand rarely makes things better unless done with a careful and systematic approach, which the cat herd that is the press is not really capable of collectively. Practically, still no, I think: there are enough of those kinds of biases that I prefer to avoid piling up more as a general principle.

Finally, would it be fair to go from “Vercel did bad thing” to “Vercel bad”, in view of those other good things? No, I think, but I wasn’t suggesting that. I did adjust my idea of their trustworthiness down fairly heavily, though. (It is possible to do good, even well-intentioned things and at the same time not operate your service in a reliable or trustworthy way.)