[tshirttime]

I recommend this piece

You and the author appear to be the same guy. To be sure, the piece itself is an academic exercise hypothesizing a world in which the MIT license were law. And in such a world, the GPL gestapo would continue railing against opaque binaries even if those binaries were shameless but legal ripoffs of someone's hard work.

If I took emacs, modified it to be thread-safe, and distributed it as an opaque binary, John Q. Emacs User retains his thread-unsafe version but now knows there's something better out there which he can't iterate on. You can say this knowledge isn't a real "loss," but that would be dismissing the concept of opportunity cost.

[GrumpySloth]

> You and the author appear to be the same guy.

We are not. We’re not even on the same continent.

[trealira]

BurntSushi has an account on Hacker News, too, under the identifier burntsushi. This person isn't them.