Direct quotes: "we shouldn't need asm for this, but gcc is being retarded" and "The switch is so retarded that it makes our command/entry abstraction crumble apart."
The pessimist in me says this is the regular old "If it's free, then you're the product" situation.
This seems like a clever way to collect valid mailing addresses. People are also likely to include personal information in their praise messages, which could be valuable data.
Their Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy state they reserve the right to share collected information with service providers, business partners, and affiliates. They can use your data for "other purposes" including "data analysis" and "identifying trends." They can share your information with "business partners to offer you certain products, services or promotions."
Monopolies are bad. Splitting up monopolies is good for the consumer.
That doesn't mean this makes any sense.
How are they going to separate Chrome from Chromium? If they do, what incentive does Google have to keep maintaining Chromium? Can Google make another new fork of Chromium and start yet another browser? Or are they now banned from making browsers? What company has the resources to maintain Chrome's massive codebase? What profit incentive is there in maintaining Chrome without Google's ad business? What about ChromeOS? How are they going to handle the extensions store and ecosystem? How is this going to impact web standards?
There's just a lot of significant unknowns surrounding this.
Direct quotes: "we shouldn't need asm for this, but gcc is being retarded" and "The switch is so retarded that it makes our command/entry abstraction crumble apart."