Yes. It's not Kik's fault. Yes. I'm glad that we have a moment when we can try to discuss and influence how this problem will be addressed. But... (maybe I'm

Yes. It's not Kik's fault. Yes. I'm glad that we have a moment when we can try to discuss and influence how this problem will be addressed. But... (maybe I'm reading this wrong) what, exactly, is problematic with NPM? @thedz, I'm not really picking on you, but the words you've used have made it clear to me that there is an assumption underlying this issue that's pretty common. The assumption that this conflict is a problem with NPM, i.e., with open-source. Is that really true? And if it is, should it be? Let's hypothesize that for the most part the "corporate world" and the "open source community" keep to themselves, have their own concerns, and don't conflict. -- When they do conflict, why does anyone assume that corporation should get its way, that their concerns are more legitimate? It's as though we believe that, unless you get paid for something you do/make, it's not yours and you don't have any rights to it. We should think about that. And then we should look at the thing that Kik did to try and draw Azer into their world (onto their turf): they offered to pay him for it. They tried to to transmute something he was doing for free into something that belongs to the world of money. I agree that it's not Kik's fault. They're just a company. Or rather, "it" is just a company. You can't expect it to act like a person. -- But this just hammers home the point that I'm trying to make, that these are really and truly different worlds colliding. Its not a big thing vs. a small thing. Its two different kinds of things. And we can't just default and use the terms and ways of the bigger thing to decide how to mediate the conflict. That's not right. That lazy. At best. Really it's just cowardly. A failure to think. A failure to believe that anything has meaning. (Turns out there's a whole phenomenon studied in historiography (that's the academic discipline that studies how history is made) about how when two parties go to war, it is inevitably perceived through the lens of power and technology, -- specifically that the side with better technology is in the "right". Hm.) In this context, it's uncanny that the discussion has centered around "who was polite" and "how much money". That's not really what this whole conflict is about. It's about whether we value a person's labor, and whether we're willing to devalue it if a company says "jump".