Compliance with the spirit is the objective. Sometimes the spirit and the letter differ for any number of reasons (many of which are completely reasonable).
People tend to get pretty upset when someone is very clearly complying with the letter while flying in complete opposition to the spirit, and it's not always an easy fix.
In that case, it sounds like the letter needs to be fixed. It's not fair to expect people to follow an ephemeral ideal of what the rules are rather than what they're told the rules actually are.
Like I said, it's not always that simple. When it's not, something less than 100% transparency allows one to look at the given particulars of a case and determine whether or not someone is simply trying to evade the spirit of a rule or not. It gives enforcement actors a little lee-way that they wouldn't otherwise have.
One of the worst things about engineers in general and HN specifically is we all pretend that law is executed like code, in a vacuum, idempotently based on the inputs. That's was, is, and will never be the case.
Abuse can be exposed and punished, and very often is.
That's why the letter of the law needs to be updated to better reflect the spirit. Imagine if police could arrest you, and keep you, without telling you why. That's something that society figured out a long time ago isn't healthy.
> Imagine if police could arrest you, and keep you, without telling you why. That's something that society figured out a long time ago isn't healthy.
The judicial system that backs it is a massive beast. If someone wants that level of assurances, they should be paying thousands of dollars for a github account. You get the level of perfection you pay for.
People tend to get pretty upset when someone is very clearly complying with the letter while flying in complete opposition to the spirit, and it's not always an easy fix.