What you can do isn't necessarily the same as what you should do. McDonald's missed an opportunity to make this even cooler by compensating the developer. A couple thousand dollars in the right place can be more effective than millions in marketing. It just shows the company cares.
How about the hundreds of open source contributors to web browsers? What about the children of the people who clean the offices of the studio that made the game? I bet I could identify about a million people who deserve a bonus here.
Hell, we're long overdue for a universal basic income - such that everyone can pursue things for the sake of coolness or intellectual curiosity or whatever if they want to, without needing to worry about making ends meet.
One could argue that the relatively high compensation for programmers is the main reason so much cool opensource stuff could even get started. A universal income for everyone could, hypothetically, put everyone in a similar position of being able to afford to do "productive" hobbies, vs. working a third minimum wage job.
It's not a random bonus though. It makes sense in the context of the promotion.
In any case, that is far off the point of my comment, which is explicit in the very first sentence. You tried flipping my argument but destroyed the context in the process.
Maybe it's both OK to say things like this to promote the megabusiness...
>Just be sure to order some McDonald’s to support them. Who knows… if we keep eating McDonald’s, they might keep producing these oddball retro gaming related projects.
>I, for one, will NEVER stop eating McDonald’s. You have my word.
...and it's also OK to wonder if that megabusiness could've paid or otherwise credited the small guy. Not that it's obligated to.
Compensation was suggested just because of the size of the company and you said, a little passive aggressively I would add, that one should read the licensing terms before commenting, in which ocasion I pointed out that what one is able to do, legally, isn't necessarily what one should do, meaning morality and legality are two separate, sometimes intersecting paths but not always, as in this case.
