Fiona

There has to be a meaningful number of companies where each individually is spending more on adobe licenses than it would cost them to pay a bunch of developers to get gimp to the point where it is a fully sufficient alternative. But hey, the only thing more important to capitalists than making profit seems to be, to not go for cheaper FLOSS options, rather than spending pointlessly large amounts of money on proprietary software…

Not telling someone something isn’t gaslighting. That’s a very different thing.

And you are making the mistake of assuming that other people think like you, have the same preferences as you, also have memories on an at least subconscious level, …

There are just so many factors, that depend on the person and this is one of those cases where extrapolating from your own lived experience is not the right way to do things. Like: I’m trans and you can trust me, that I have my own places, where I know that I can’t apply my standards to other people (“what do you mean, people don’t like the effects of cross-sex hormones?”).

I’m positively surprised that the article acknowledges the nuance of question of whether unknowing victims should be informed, instead of just jumping on the “tell them all, no matter if it hurts them more than the crime did”.

Anyone who claims that there is a simple answer that is always best is acting out of ideology, rather than an interest in improving people’s lives…

The one thing that might help somewhat, at huge logistic cost, would be to ask everyone what their preference in a situation like that is, ideally with the possibility to have different answers for different crimes. Like, combine it with a question on being an organ-donor and a couple of similar things. Since it goes to everyone, people who don’t know and don’t want to know can stay in blissful ignorance, because the question doesn’t arise suspicions, as it would be if only they got asked. You could still get bad results, but in that case they would at least be the results the people in question choose. Though even this approach can’t easily deal with the cases of minors being involved…

All that said, there is another component to the case, that might be the biggest problem with it: The perpetrator getting of easy because it was assumed that the victims didn’t know and the implication of a much harder punishment had they been known to have known: Whether the victims knew, didn’t change the crime that was committed, only the outcome. And punishing the outcome rather than the action is an extremely bad way to enact justice. (Yes, attempted murder should be punished like murder!)

That “m” should be a “b”. For a company that size, there is truly no excuse!