Can’t the MIC just use any existing Linux distro?

I am trying to understand what the injury here is?

Is it mostly about reputational damage from association? Kinda like why are we eating the same food as MIC and at the same table? Is there an injury here beyond this that I am not seeing?

Couldn’t the MIC shut down every FOSS project by declaring they love them and use them? I hope no FOSS dev is so simpleminded as to knee jerk like that.

We have to accept living in a dirty world with dirty people, to some extent. People we don’t like will use our favorite projects sometimes. That’s par for the course.

Where I would draw the line is implemeting some change into the distro that is either only or primarily useful for nefarious purposes, and is largely useless to 99% of normal/ethical use cases. Now THAT would be a real problem, and a real red line, imo.

Bias is inevitable.

It makes no sense to work to eliminate it.

It’s like trying to breed a new species of humans that are void of preferences. An impossible task. If such a breeding process somehow succeded, the resulting product would not be a human anyway.

If anyone claims to be unbiased themselves, or claims freedom from bias for someone else, even just implying that someone somewhere is unbiased, I immediately know bullshit is afoot. Such claims are not always knowingly malicious, but are always detrimental to my interests should I start foolishly believing them.