begin quoting Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade as of Sat, Mar 12, 2005 at 07:35:27PM -0800: > On Mar 11, 2005, at 5:09 PM, Stewart Stremler wrote: > > >It's the competence and attitude that I don't trust. > > there is a point, however, at which you must decide to trust the > supplier.
To a certain extent. Trust is not a binary value. It's not "no trust" or "complete trust". The operating system is supposed to *shield* me from the need to completely trust a supplier. If I have to jump through hoops or take extreme measures to achieve a comfortable level of trust, the operating system, package system, and software are failing me. OS X had a real advantage in the "open this archive and drag the folder to where you want it". I see that advantage rapidly evaporating. And it makes me sad. I had hoped this sensible approach might take root and the meme might infect general OSS development. Alas. > I suppose it's easier to make that decision when there's an > actual vendor behind it to take responsibility, but everybody's > distributing or selling software with licenses that explicitly absolves > them of responsibility should anything go wrong. Licenses absolving them of responsibility don't necessarily mean anything. Especially in California, where it's not possible to sign away all of your rights. > So, I suppose, nobody's to be trusted. So maybe we shouldn't install > anything. :) That's the general idea. If a vendor demands that you give _them_ full and unrestricted access to *your* machine, you should tell them to take a long walk off a short dock. The only reason this sort of arrogant "your machine is my machine so suck it up" attitude works is that the users cave in and go along. "There is no alternative," they mutter, and "those software people wouldn't ask me to do something that wasn't NECESSARY." The very attitudes that caused many of us seek out _alternative_ systems, from applications like OpenOffice and operating systems like Linux, has come to roost in the open-source community. Once again we see that the new boss is the same as the old boss... -Stewart "It's interesting, trying to compile OSS on an SS20/Linux" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
