He's got a point, but it feels like nutpicking to me, and a bit of attacking a straw man.
I don't think sensible people are arguing that the Sparrow team don't have a legal right to shut down or sell their company as they please. The discussion is over something subtler.
When I'm building something for my users, I see myself as in collaboration with them. And it feels the same to me on the user side. I'm not legally obligated to take an hour to write up a good bug report for a product I like. And I'm certainly not entitled to my usual hourly rate when I file the bug report. I do it because we're up to something together; capitalism is just the mechanism by which we make that sustainable and equitable.
I'm not a Mac user, so I've never even seen Sparrow, much less used it. But in their shoes, I wouldn't have just left my users in the lurch. I would have tried to find somebody to take over the product, or open-sourced it. Not because I was obligated, but because service to the users was the spirit in which I would have started the project.
Straw man is not the best concept to evaluate arguments in the world of tweets where every potential argument can be exemplified without nuance or detail by 140 characters. If you are considering writing an essay (or ascertaining the truth of a situation) you should be focused on the best possible argument your opponent could be making, even if it's better than the argument they ARE making. The best possible argument they could make is a better representation of the reality you actually face (i.e. the reality as distinct from the argument you are having; the real reality that you want to come to have an understanding of, and doesn't care that you are arguing about it).
I personally don't think this article addressed AT ALL the best or most nuanced arguments mounted by the the opponents to Sparrow's actions, and I say this as someone who hadn't heard of Sparrow before today and thus doesn't have much of a dog in this fight (Although I am generally predisposed to the notion that people can do whatever they want with their own apps).
I don't think sensible people are arguing that the Sparrow team don't have a legal right to shut down or sell their company as they please. The discussion is over something subtler.
When I'm building something for my users, I see myself as in collaboration with them. And it feels the same to me on the user side. I'm not legally obligated to take an hour to write up a good bug report for a product I like. And I'm certainly not entitled to my usual hourly rate when I file the bug report. I do it because we're up to something together; capitalism is just the mechanism by which we make that sustainable and equitable.
I'm not a Mac user, so I've never even seen Sparrow, much less used it. But in their shoes, I wouldn't have just left my users in the lurch. I would have tried to find somebody to take over the product, or open-sourced it. Not because I was obligated, but because service to the users was the spirit in which I would have started the project.