Reply to post: You thought that?

You thought that?

"Even though Google dumped that phrase from its code of conduct in 2018, many of us still thought Google was a bit better than other companies."

Now why did you think that? I won't get into a which tech company is more evil debate here, because for any company that's existed more than a decade, there are some people who think any line of code they write must be simultaneously the most stupid thing ever written and another brick in the wall of corporate dictatorship (I'm thinking of reactions to Microsoft mostly, but they're not the only one). Still, by 2018, Google had lots of dodgy programs going on. Still use their search, still like Android, appreciate the open source stuff, I get why you'd do that, for the same reason why I can acknowledge that Apple's devices have some good features even if the prices are excessive and support too patchy.

I still don't see any reason why you would consider Google better than the pack by that point. Their privacy record had become clear. Their product support record with Android updates and Chromebook lifetimes was known. Complaints about their anticompetitive activities weren't new and the proof to back them up wasn't hard to find. Since open source is important in your estimation, you could see all the non-open standards they were shoving through W3C and similar bodies at the time, doing significant damage to open standards and making life harder for competitors who were actually writing open source software. Evidently none of this lowered them in your estimation, but firing some open source developers was the last straw. I don't support that either, but I'm a lot less surprised than you seem to be that they did it.