@cypnk one afternoon my coworkers drunkenly emailed one of the original unix wizards to ask "why did 'creat' lose its final E? because keyboards were hard to type on back then?"
and he wrote back "no, because shorter is better" is if this was an obvious fact 😆
On the other hand, it's probably still a good idea to run even free software in a sandbox whenever possible, since there could still be bugs. However, their "punishment" is not social exclusion, but patches sent to fix them. 🙂
On the other side, ultimately there is a weak point in computing where you have to trust something; I choose to trust those projects that make a goodwill gesture by developing their project in the open.
Some good discussion on the WhatsApp Facebook ultimatum: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215
Designing a secure social network where everything you post is encrypted with a one time pad sourced from a random number generator which is discarded immediately after you submit the post.
And of course Monty Python put this far more entertainingly: What have the Romans ever done for us?
@triz my phone definitely recoils at some of the things i post