[msla]

> The point of the article was to debunk some of the perceived "evils" of proprietary software.

The idea that software can sell my information isn't just a "perceived" evil anymore.

Back in the 1990s, the closed-source advocates had more of a point: Internet access wasn't omnipresent, and wasn't assumed to be, and it was legitimately more difficult to monetize whatever information you could collect, if only because hard drives to store it were more expensive.

These days, well, Microsoft is adding advertisements to its email application. What else is it doing? Anyone who knows has signed an NDA. European governments might be able to GDPR some of it out of them, but I doubt they'll be able to get all of it. Code is law, after all, and steganography is a very old field.

The trust has been poisoned. The innocence is lost.