[droithomme]

This article was written just a few months after the Justice Department in late 2010 announced its agreement with Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit and Pixar regarding their anticompetitive practices. It is clearly a reaction to that agreement and its purpose is to lay out an argument that can be used to maintain plausible deniability regarding anticompetitive agreements by arguing that these activities are just friends being polite and displaying good manners, rather than a conspiracy to defraud top talent of market wages.

[mindslight]

It's not this post that's terribly wrong, but the widespread fallacy of equivalence between tiny companies and large corporations. It's not inconsistent to think it reasonable for small startups to avoid hiring each other's employees, yet that scaling this up to a significant part of the labor market is problematic.

[greenyoda]

Owning a small company doesn't magically exempt you from obeying the law.

[mindslight]

Sure, but when discussing morality, the current legality is irrelevant.