Just like you never step in the same river twice, you never do business with the same company twice. Staff and executives change over time, and companies shift for better or worse.

Should we hold grudges against brands for things totally different people did 10? 20? 50? years ago? That seems weird to me.

Unity specifically deserves loss of trust and all the pain they get. But in 5 years, or 10 years or whatever, should we assume they are less trustworthy than other companies because of what this group of managers did?

It might be fine! Maybe on that particular day, somebody with cholera had just taken a shit upstream, and the bacteria are totally gone now. But it's still a useful prior, and that's the case here with whom you choose to conduct business.

I think it's a question of burden of proof. You'd ordinarily not worry too much about cholera, but after an incident you'd want the water thoroughly and repeatedly tested. You probably would not say "eh, it's been 5 or 10 years, it's most likely fine."

Similarly you'd want some concrete evidence that a company has actually changed, in a degree sufficient to offset your negative prior, before you'd consider engaging in any further business with them.

But actually doing that research is a pain in the ass, so I think it's a reasonable strategy to simply prefer companies that haven't screwed you over wherever good options exist.

No. Further, I'd stop drinking untreated water from all rivers. (Just answering your hypothetical. I spend a lot of time in the wilderness and wouldn't drink untreated water from a river or lake to begin with.)

This effect, though, has happened with software for me years ago. Enough bad actors exist that I've reached the place where I trust very few software houses (and I trust exactly zero SV-style companies). Not that all of those rivers are polluted, of course, but that it's impossible to tell which ones are and which ones aren't by looking at them.

I would never dare to start a business that depended on any of them. The risk is simply too great.

I may be stretching the limits of the analogy here, but either way that "verify, then trust" approach is more work than "adaptive blissful ignorance", and a lot of people aren't going to do it, or will at least slack off as the pain of the original incident becomes a more distant memory.

The only protection against this is contracts, but when a company -- like Unity has done twice now -- decides to retroactively change the terms of existing contracts, that means that you cannot trust them at all going into the future even if they're solidly "good" right now.

There's limited benefit to having the source code when the community has been splintered, and the future direction is contrary to your needs. Sure, you can make your own fixes, etc, but you no longer enjoy the leverage community development.

And that's still better than being stuck with arbitrary price changes.

Open source completely avoid this one problem. Apache-style development was created exactly for that.

You can complain that it's way overkill and a company doesn't actually need that level of assurance. But you can't claim it's not sufficient.

Without the concentration of diverse efforts that go into maintaining and advancing a project, having the source code (alone) is of minimal benefit.

For example, the first company that comes to mind has seemed to have shameless underhandedness deep in its DNA, and to exhibit its malevolent side each new chance it gets, as much as it can. This has repeated over the course of decades, and over multiple top leadership changes.

If it's true that certain kinds of underhandedness are in that company's DNA, to a degree unlike most other companies, I wonder how deep they'd have to decapitate the org chart, to cut out the roots of that culture. Including SVPs? VPs? Further? It's in the board, too?

The one time I bumped into Larry Ellison, he managed to come across as intensely competitive, in just a moment. I'd guess that's probably reflected in his company.

Does Oracle seem a steady in-your-face aggressive, and you know what you get?

Or is more a cyclic and plotting: in-your-face shameless when they can get away with it, and makes nice when they have to, while running long-cons (some of them very underhanded)?

Around some other vendors, there's collective loss of institutional (field) knowledge about what you're going to get.

I suppose contributing to this could be a lot of new people who aren't mentored-in as well as they could be.

Also, there's been a field shift towards many (most?) ICs and even managers/execs not being incentived to become aware of non-short-term implications of vendor and tech choices. Whether it's ICs driven by sprint metrics, startups motivated to rapidly throw up appearances of growth to hit funding rounds, or people job-hopping every 18 months before they see longer-term cause&effect.

We certainly believed it when Google started, and they were talking like the then-familiar Internet-savvy altruistic forward-looking engineer types.

Today, you can still see many examples of Google doing things well. (And of course many examples of things that we wouldn't have expected them to do, including some that would've gotten them ostracized.)

You've inverted the sense here, by treating reputation as something based on default trust and exceptional "grudges". What has really happened is that they've destroyed the exceptional positive reputation they spent the past decade and a half building. A new reputation can certainly be built over the next decade, but for now they're mostly back to the default state of deserving no trust.

It only seems weird because it's irrational, but the irrationality of vengeance is what has made humans the dominant species on the planet.

If your child is killed by a lion it makes sense to avoid lions. It makes no rational sense to seek out lions to kill, but guess what a human will do. And see what the result is.

Now it’s just another e-commerce site that’s been completely and utterly overrun with marked up Aliexpress junk and low quality copies of anything novel that gains the slightest bit of popularity. The few remaining authentic sellers now charge so much it’s laughable unless you’re wealthy enough that cost isn’t a concern.

In contrast to buying seeds off Amazon or eBay, where the plants that sellers are claiming they're shipping you seeds for are often just random weeds rather than the hilariously photoshopped or non-existent flowers/fruits shown in the product listing.

e.g. https://www.amazon.ca/Glamaours-Climbing-Strawberry-Deliciou...

or

https://www.amazon.ca/Rosepoem-100pcs-rainbow-vegetable-Non-...