[niggler]

You mean Google broke aaronsw's guess at google's understanding of evil.

Evil is a relative term, and if Microsoft is seen as the Evil empire then cutting off amicable relations (manifested by open interfaces) can be construed as "not evil"

Read the update to the article, where he points out that the entire concept of ads could be construed as evil by some.

[r00fus]

There is a continuum of evil - on one end, you have ruthless bloodthirsty organizations who don't balk at breaking all the rules to make a dollar or point, on the other end you have "mostly self-consistent" organizations like FSF and EFF.

Microsoft isn't pure evil, they're were just seen as being closer to the bloodthirsty end than Apple or Google. It used to be that Google was seen as closer to the FSF side than, say, Microsoft.

Nowadays, it's pretty clear all of these big tech firms are not far apart and moving more towards the ruthless side of the spectrum.

[freshhawk]

aaronsw was quoting google sources, not guessing.

[niggler]

"They’re all instances of refusing to make things worse for your users in order to make more money." <-- factual statement

However, 'evil' is not defined in context: https://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/

Therefore, the leap "evil = make things worse for your users" is not from a google source. That's Aaron's attempt to construct a categorical rule from the examples.

"Google unambiguously break their own definition of 'evil'." <-- False, since google didn't explicitly define evil. They broke what Aaron believed google meant when they said "evil".