In regard to proprietary hardware, it is my assertion that Apple and Amazon are essentially making the same move: throw money they obtained by dominating their respective markets into closed hardware development that will allow them to lock into their market dominance in the future by limiting consumer choice. You might disagree but there is nothing fallacious about this line of reasoning.

If you are looking for a fallacy take your argument from authority: if Linus does something then it cannot possibly be wrong. Which doesn't even get the point I'm making above, where I clearly contrast developing FOSS for the MacBook which is clearly a good thing (what Linus is doing), with buying a development MacBook for convenience, thereby putting your money to work against software liberty.

Except we clearly see that Linus has bought Macs over and over again. Presumably because they're the best tool for the job and he likes them. And you still have failed (like everyone else) to make any real argument that Apple is somehow warring against "software liberty". Promoting your own platform doesn't amount to doing so, certainly.

Again, what Linus does and doesn't is not relevant for a discussion about morality - unless you are starting a religion centered around him as a moral model.

Fyi, the App Store license is deliberately incompatible with the GPL.

There is no such thing as "App Store license".

I was referring to the terms and conditions Apple imposes on developers that wish to publish software on the App store.

Luckily you're not required to publish software on the App Store. Many developers sell direct from their website these days.

How is it deliberately incompatible? How is VLC on the app store while claiming in its about page to be GPLv2 licensed? What specific language in the GPL or App Store T&C is incompatible?

You have to declare you own the intellectual rights of the underlying code, a thing GPL does not grant. You can of course dual license your own code but you cannot own code released by someone else under GPL, and you cannot publish it in the App Store. It would be an absolutely trivial change for Apple to make their store friendly towards opens source and there have been multiple protests about this.

I think projects like VLC request some sort of copyright waiver from contributors so they can relicense in the future, or simply ignoring the TOS, and exposing themselves to summary deletion.

There, this explains it, VLC actually is dual licensed under MPLv2 as well according to it’s about page. Thanks for clearing that up