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Comment by tal8d | Hacker News Reader

A company can damage an open source project in a number of creative ways that have nothing to do with file formats. One word: Oracle. OpenOffice vs LibreOffice is a pretty good example of plausibly deniable sabotage that would enjoy a bonus with the number of people interjecting, index finger raised, with "Actually, Hanlon's razor..." To be fair to Oracle, Sun didn't help that situation at all, Oracle just ratcheted it up.

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Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.

Simple Sabotage Field Manual (Office of Strategic Services, 1944) is full of suggestions along these lines, which appear to still be in wide use.

I prefer the more mean spirited "aggressively stupid", but I don't want to tempt a splintering of the "Hanlon's razor" people - I'm quite happy with the mental image I have of them already.

You can always go deeper:

1. Not malice but incompetence

2. Actually malice, trying to make it look like incompetence, but being incompetent at that makes it... both?

3. Actually being competent at feigning incompetence (the ultimate malice?), perhaps we need to develop a new 'razor' for that.

This needs a wikipedia entry.

This is "Grey's law", mentioned at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

It's reversed. You look like a harmless idiot while being a harmful mastermind.

Malice is itself a form of incompetence.

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