> I beg to differ, and consider both definitions you subsequently give as incredibly restrictive as it would exclude some of the most used APIs in the wild. Yo

> I beg to differ, and consider both definitions you subsequently give as incredibly restrictive as it would exclude some of the most used APIs in the wild. You'll have to take that up with OED and Wikipedia. I think it's fair to say that at the point that they agree with each other and disagree with us that we're the ones using the words wrong rather than them, and it's us who need to invent new words rather than they. That's what it means to be a language authority. #1 seems like an overall summary statement so my response is implied by the below #2 I can't detect any disagreement #3 - "you do not have a license to do that" - They also don't have a license to rent a bouncy castle. Phil isn't listing things that they don't have a license to do, he's (attempting to) explain why Apple rejected the application. He's implying that a license exists. 4. The word "violation" has a specific legal meaning. In this case, I can tell you for sure that he's specifically referring to agreements that Apple has with hardware manufacturers (which actually say you cannot do this explicitly), which RA has never read 5. I will concede that Phil's statement is technically correct, but when you consider how the average customer would interpret this statement, it leads them to an incorrect conclusion. 6 & 7 - No point of disagreement that I can detect. 8. No point of disagreement that I can detect. > can we call those purposeful lies? Phil is on the board of directors of a publicly traded company and society holds such people to an extremely high standard of honesty. I'm not sure why the word purposeful is of any relevance, but they're certainly misleading statements and Phil Schiller is not employed by Apple to blab whatever he thinks of to say to random customers. > In a word, they assumed they had the right to circumvent a mechanism protecting Apple's licensing scheme (however vile we think it is WRT interoperability), made a run for it, were caught red handed, and called out the web regarding the injustice. Maybe they genuinely believe they're right, but that does not make them the good guys. The following set of words: {right, vile, made a run for it, red handed, called out, injustice, good guys} ascribe a certain moral narrative to this situation that I do not subscribe to at all. There are a lot of very worldviewish questions in here (e.g. what it means for a software company to be moral, whether morality can be meaningfully ascribed to a company, etc.) I don't mean to dissuade you of these views, because I imagine that if we take the time to wade through it, we will discover that each other's positions are pretty reasonable. But that would require us to wade through a lot of psychology, philosophy, religion and ethics to arrive at that point, and so in the interests of time I would recommend steering clear of ascribing particular ethical conclusions to the actions of actors except in the narrow cases where it is actually important, in which case we must be willing to defend it at some length. One such area (of valuable exploration) is whether, assuming Phil made misstatements in his e-mail, it was morally correct to send. I think we agree on enough of the points to conclude that these misstatements did exist, and so the problem reduces to whether a corporate director sending misstatements to a customer is immoral. From your reply, the operative test seems to be whether they constituted a purposeful lie which is, at the very least, an interesting test.