Like this, exactly

Posted Mar 21, 2014 2:34 UTC (Fri) by terrycloth (guest, #96095)
In reply to: Not going to buy any Samsung device again. by dlang
Parent article: FSF: Replicant developers find and close Samsung Galaxy back-door

Decades ago, in another life, I was part of a team trying to build Microsoft Office, except we weren’t Microsoft, and Office didn’t yet exist. We (maybe half a dozen?) were just trying to paste together a word processor, a spreadsheet, maybe e-mail and a contact manager, in a way that would be useful to executives and make us filthy rich.

One of the requirements was to phone home and tell us what the user was doing with our suite, purely to find ways to improve it. (I’m not being ironic here, that was really what was intended.) We took exception to that, and a few of us were ready to quit before implementing such a thing. And management backed off.

Of course, that was in the ’80s, when any halfway decent programmer could walk out the door and get a (quite possibly better & better-paying) job by next week. As raven667 mentions below, the prospect of going hungry, or even living under a bridge, tests one’s beliefs mightily. I don’t know what I’d do in today’s economy. I know what I hope I’d do, but you can’t be sure until push comes to shove.