What GPL based companies? IBM, RedHat, etc don't care about the GPL. All they care about is working software with a community behind it. What license it uses is largely irrelevant.

No. Its not all or nothing, rather pieces of the GPL may get struck down. For example what a court defines to be a derivative binary work may be quite different than what GPL advocates say a derivative binary work is. The rest of the GPL, in particular those portions dealing with source code contributions and redistribution, may remain intact.

One of the reasons I live where I do is because I'm close to work, about 4 miles away. Lets me bike in. That way I don't have to deal with the expense and clusterfuck that is parking on a big campus. 4 miles is a very easy, short, ride so it is no problem. You don't need to change or anything, you don't work up a sweat.

You discover Apple software sucks way less on OS-X. The fanboys will tell you this is evidence of how much better OS-X is, of course, but the real reason is Apple doesn't do a good job on their ports. They really half-ass their Windows ports so they end up not being good software. It is possibly something to try and make OS-X look better but more likely simply laziness and a lack of good Windows developers.

There's a big difference between not going out of your way to support something and going out of your way to prevent it. Windows doesn't have a native POSIX interface (it used to have a basic one) but you can add one if you like. It can be done higher level via something like Cygwin, or it can be done directly in the executive just like the Win32/64 APIs. There is nothing stopping you from adding it, they don't care.

Same deal with DirectX and OpenGL. A Windows GPU driver has to provide DirectX support. It is just part of the WDDM driver. Windows provides no OpenGL acceleration, and no software emulation. However you can provide your own OpenGL driver if you wish, and Intel, nVidia, and AMD all elect to do so. Windows does nothing to stop this and they work great (if the company writes a good driver). Indeed you could develop your own graphic API and implement that, if you wished.

There's a big difference between saying "We aren't going to do any work to support your stuff," and saying "We are going to work to make sure your stuff can't be supported."

The court can't just jump up and say "We don't like that, it goes out." They have to follow procedure which means a challenge has to appear in front of them. That challenge can also only be brought by someone with standing, meaning that this law had a negative impact on you somehow.

That's one of the reasons the government loves the secret gathering so much, makes it harder for it to get challenged. If you can't show this harmed you, then you can't fight it in court.

So someone has to be impacted by this, challenge it, and it has to be appealed up to the SC. Then and only then do they rule on it.

How can you say the addon user did not give explicit permission? They are running an addon that auto clicks on buttons. Perhaps the addon agreed. :-)

That is a good description of an expected sequence of events. However unintended consequences involve things one is not expecting, that one has not considered. Which are things commonly associated with exploits. I'm sure that in time we'll learn of a sequence of events where auto clicking on a button yielded negative consequences.

The government figured out ride sharing vs commercial activity long ago in the area of a private pilot's license vs a commercial pilot's license. A private pilot can take a passenger who chips in for fuel. I think the chipping in has to be accurate with respect to fuel, no gross overpaying for the passenger's fair share. Also I don't think splitting rental or maintenance costs were allowed, just fuel. And the passenger can absolutely have no influence on where or when the plane departs and where it goes. The passenger literally has to be leaving, arriving and go to a destination that the pilot was going to anyway. If the passenger has such influence on the flight a commercial license is necessary.

That said, maybe a new commercial class of driver's license is needed for "drivers for hire"? Something that involves a little extra driver training, a vehicle inspection, insurance requirements, etc?

Representatives in the colonial legislatures were (1) from the region they represented and (2) they were voted into office by citizens of that region. (1) and (2) were considered necessary in that era for representation. So while one individual colonist did not get to vote for a representative, some number of colonists did. That non-voting colonist had a "neighbor" chosen by other "neighbors" to write to. (1) and (2) were absent with respect to parliament. No colonials present. No one elected by colonials. Hence no representation.

You are having a forest/trees moment.

That said, good thing that there are no javascript exploits that lead to arbitrary code execution. Otherwise a user could inadvertently approve of running such arbitrary code via an auto clicking addon. Its not unauthorized use of the user's computer since they clicked?

Again, the main point is that auto clicking can have unintended consequences. Its naive to think its just going to screw up advertisers and not provide and entirely new avenue for exploitation.

My understanding is that tortious interference is about a 3rd party (the user in this case) interfering with business between others (website and advertiser). The third party does not need to be part of any agreement in order to be interfering. Users of this addon might be at risk if so.

It is called Software Assurance. Been doing it for quite some time.

Write endurance is not an issue for desktop SSDs, even in power user setups. Slashdot had an article on it just a few days ago. Seriously, writing logs is not an issue, at all, with regards to the endurance of your drive.

It might be illegal for merely trying to interfere with business between others (website and advertiser). Tortious interference.