From the linked article: "They expected to drop these 4 lines on me and have me work for Apple for free, but what was weird about the call is they were begging me to do this. There was a pleading, begging, hands clasped together, with all these reasons why I should do it for them. "Please, it's such a small change. It'll really help us out. Can't you just spare a few hours of your time and help us poor Trillionaires out this one time Zed?""

He has a point, specious arguments to maximising shareholder value are the usual rebuttal, and they are (aside from being a straw man I just invoked) really silly: far far better to spend shareholder value small ways to increase shareholder value in big ways.

Pay for your open source oh begger barons.

My favorite part of todays Robber Barons is they all have very similar offerings with similar price structure, but they are not monopolies because the other Barons are doing it too.

For example they all settled on 30% tax on app store revenues.

That's one of the best pieces of writing I've read all year -- bravo. An angle I've somehow not noticed, but resonates with me.