Philosophers have been arguing about morality and ethics for thousands of years, and are no closer to consensus than they have ever been. The idea that 'I should be allowed to do whatever I want with computing machinery that I have bought' is a political choice, and because only a very small proportion is able to exercise that belief or even understand what it means, it is highly susceptible to being discarded in favour of beliefs like 'do whatever it takes to get the scammers off the internet'.
> The usual answer that their livelyhoods depend on it is simplistic, these are the best paid developers in the US, pretty sure they have some sway power.
You think that Google's best and brightest are working on the Google Play store?
No idea, whoever they are they're still well compensated and can afford some resistance
> What makes you so sure that such a hypothetical code of ethics would promote user freedom? I think it far more likely that protecting the user from harm (i.e., not allowing the user to install malware) would appear in that code.
Maybe? Maybe not? I never said I'm sure of it, but computing is built on a history of openness and interoperability. We at somepoint agreed having open hardware and protocols was the way to go, and we were right. A lot of the world runs on open source software, we managed to built the internet, we have PCs where you can swap components and it just works. None of that is obvious if you were to re-invent it in 2025. Malware is an excuse, you can battle that without losing any of the above.
Claiming that people you've never met are sufficiently financially secure to risk their livelihood for your protest movement is the kind of hubris I hope to never have.
> computing is built on a history of openness and interoperability
There was nothing inevitable about this, and while it is the superior engineering choice, that's not how decisions are made. Open standards and protocols only gained industry support because those industry players were trying to commoditise their complements, and open standards were the only way to achieve that. There are plenty of players in the industry who work under the monolithic closed-source model, but we 'cool kids' never hear about them, because they only talk to massive businesses with procurement departments.
I don't understand your agressiveness towards me, this is a conversation, we can talk and disagree without insulting.
I don't know every developer at Google or their situation but the idea that they're victims of a system that forces their hand is a stretch. There's people resisting changes they don't want at every step of the soci-economical ladder in different countries across countries and cultures. I can 100% understand a single person not being able to do so given their life circustances, but we're talking about a change across an organisation that probably encompases 100s of people, this is not resting on a single person. As I said in my original post, there's doctors in poorer countries with better ethics, what's different about developers?