I’m an open source advocate, but still appreciate that Windows is the most used PC operating system on the planet. The fact that you can use the tool ITA as it’s presented on stock Windows (when this is a recently added feature) is relevant info that’s useful to readers and I highly doubt parent intended it in any way to be an ad.

Not to put words in his mouth, but he’s probably just proud to have some influence on making Windows users’ lives a little easier and it would be an odd thing for him to expect people familiar with curl to suddenly become Windows partisans just because they’re now prepacking it (or generally for any Microsoft engineer to have much personal interest in convincing end users to adopt Windows personally).

This is supremely relevant though. The docs basically say "It's supposed to work like X, but for Windows you need to do ABCEDFGHIJ". OC is just "Actually, X works on windows now."

This comment is rude, inaccurate, and not in line with the rules of HN.

For the life of me I cannot understand why would anyone waste their money on such keys. Usually those are volume licenses being sold separately, which is not legal and does not provide you with a valid license. If one is intent on breaking the law anyway, one can save those two bucks and use of the many safe activation methods which do not require installing anything on your machine.