Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for this very reason. You might think it's ridiculous but the fight for the right to modify the software running on devices you own has been raging for 35 years and is bigger than ever.
TIL I learned "GNU" is somehow pronounced with one syllable ("gnew") and not two ("guh-noo"). (I know lowercase "gnu" is pronounced with one syllable.)
It starts out reasonable, but then has gems like "please buy bus tickets only with cash under a fake name", "find me a parrot", "go to the hotel and figure out if their phone jacks do dial-up because that's most likely the only thing that will work with my machine".
The latter may have adjusted with the times, since the document is old; but then again, the demands he places on streaming technology etc. are perfectly reasonable nowadays, but a massive obstacle back then.
This is because he's actively against surveillance. It's not a hard requirement, I've lent him an anonymous (i.e. pre-paid) public transport card before, and while he didn't like the requirement to both check on and check off, he did it anyway.
> find me a parrot
That's a misrepresentation. It's a "it'd be nice if" type thing. There's also the "don't buy one" comment, because you can be sure someone has done that.
> go to the hotel and figure out if their phone jacks do dial-up because that's most likely the only thing that will work with my machine
That might be really old, his machine definitely has wifi. And if the request is from the pre-wifi with free software drivers days, it's completely reasonable for someone who lives a chunk of their life on the internet to request internet access.
It's much, much more reasonable than you're making out, especially if you consider it in the context of why you're probably asking him to speak at some event.
That's exactly what protesters did in Honk Kong in 2019 to avoid retaliation from China
So he was right, again
More recently, he was pushed out of MIT and the FSF last year for questioning whether one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims was truly a victim or not.
He prefers Emacs over Vim.
There are probably other examples, but that's off the top of my head.
He's a monster.
`cat>newfile.txt` - teaches you not to make typos.
I wasn't expecting to laugh, haha. This is great, good stuff!
...But seriously why? How could such a thing be possible?! I would like to know his reasons.
I’ve never really been much of an RMS fan beyond admiration for what he has done for free software, but this is not what he said, at least according to his words as quoted in the post that initiated his cancellation[1]. I’ve pasted it from that post below [2]. The author of that post quoted this and then somehow inferred this [3]. How she (and everyone reading it thereafter) went from one line to the next from “she PRESENTED herself as willing” (not that she actually was willing), “assuming she was being COERCED by Epstein” somehow got reinterpreted as “she was entirely willing”.
Nothing RMS said stated he thought she wasn’t a victim, just that Minsky may not have known due to how Epstein coerced her to present herself.
But hey, the witch hunters got their burning.
[1] https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec2...
[2] We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
[3] and then he says that an enslaved child could, somehow, be “entirely willing”.
The context also make his comments strain credulity beyond the breaking point. "We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing." So this 73 year old man has a 17 year old approach him for sex on one of his patron's famous young-girl-harem flights, and I'm to understand that Minsky can't apply his AI-pioneering genius to figure out what's going on? Like, am I supposed to believe that he thought this girl young enough to be his granddaughter was just attracted to his magnetic personality? Give me a break.
> Minsky may not have known
Can you really look me in the screen and tell me you believe that? Again I say: give me a break.
I think it's better to call a spade a shovel here and concede that Minsky knew what he was doing. The fact is Stallman probably _didn't_ consider Minksy to have done anything wrong, and that's why he spoke up, and he was "cancelled" because it was pretty plain to everyone else that it _was_ wrong.
I think you’re relying heavily on hindsight here. Yes it’s obvious to us looking in from the outside, but thinking back to any large events/conferences I’ve been at, especially if alcohol was involved, if somebody pretended to be willing because they were coerced to do so, I’m not sure it would have been so obvious and it’s easy to get caught up in the moment and not realise something was off.
But, that’s not the issue here. I don’t necessarily disagree with you and if the argument had stated what you said then it would have been ok to call RMS out.
But that’s not what happened, instead people twisted his words to make him out even worse. Nobody said “how can you believe that Minsky didn’t know something was wrong?” They said “you said she was willing and not a victim! How dare you!”, when he very clearly did not say that.
So you figure 73 year old Minsky was on this plane or whatever, a highschooler offers to have sex with him and he just figured, what, she was caught up in the heat of passion? Maybe high schoolers offer to have sex with him in the normal course of his geriatric affairs?
I think you’re still not really being honest by trying to construct some scenario where Minsky could have not realized this young girl was either paid or ordered to have sex with him. Walk through it in your head and I defy you to come up with a scenario where Minsky could have not known this was a girl being either paid or ordered to have sex with him.
No, I meant he might have been caught up in the moment and ignore his better judgement. Also, I dunno about you, but I iften find it very dificult to tell the difference between a somewhat mature looking highscooler and someone who is 19 — 21 ish. Of course, I also don’t have sex with people in that age group, but my point is that its often very hard to tell if someone is late teens ir early twenties, so, again, in the heat of the moment, especially with alcohol or other substances, its not hard to think that she’s young, but not underage.
I’ve been in plenty of situations where there were “groupies” willing to sleep with much older guys because of fame or oerceuved money or power, where nothing nefarious was going on. So, no, I don’t think its a stretch at all that he could have thought this. I obviously have no idea what the reality was in thus particular situation; neither of us know what Minsky was or wasn’t thinking. I’ve also heard reports that withesses said he turned her down, but I can’t find anything to back that up now, so could be BS.
I’m not saying he’s innocent, he could have been completely willful in the situation, but I do not believe its a 100% clear that he’s definitely guilty either.
And in the context of RMS, I think what he said, in context, wasn’t particularly unreasonable. I think people should have challenged his views and had a conversation like we’re doing, instead if twisting his words to tell a false narrative because they don’t like him and wanted an excuse to attack him.
To be honest you've changed my mind a bit here & I'm a bit more on RMS's side now. Agreed that a witch-hunt was in progress, which caught some "actual witches" and lots of others along the way.
But from an optics perspective, ffs why would you defend an Epstein associate & fellow-traveller at that point in time. I mean he's dead, he's not going to be hurt by the accusations at that point. ️ oh well.
Note that this is current law in Germany.
Does he also prefer apples over oranges?
The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia" also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally--but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.
[0]: https://stallman.org/archives/2003-may-aug.html
---
I don't think child pornography should be legal.
14 September 2019 (Sex between an adult and a child is wrong)
Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
[0] https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
---
Stallman's former view on this was always wrong. But it is good to hear he has changed his mind, and I think to be fair to him, if one brings up his former views, one should also bring up his more recent disavowal of them.
I hope that he has changed his mind, but until there's some evidence that he's changed his behavior, there's no reason to assume he was doing anything but covering his ass (possibly at the behest of someone else) and trying to save his position and status. That's what would be assumed of anyone else, that's what should be assumed of him.
I think his former views were completely wrong, but I try to understand where he was coming from: RMS comes out of a progressive 1970s cultural milieu in which a lot of people were willing to question all aspects of traditional moral values, including age of consent laws. I can think of a number of now-mainstream European politicians, who in the 1970s were willing to associate with (or at least tolerate) "pro-pedophile" advocacy groups, and that way they behaved in the 1970s has come back to bite them – Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Harriet Harman, Jack Dromey, Patricia Hewitt. Someone like Allen Ginsberg, who was an open member of NAMBLA – and, by at least some accounts, actively abused underage boys – was nonetheless an acceptable figure in polite society – something that would be quite unbelievable in the year 2020. In the 1970s, a lot of what is now the mainstream gay rights movement was willing to associate with organisations like NAMBLA; by the 1980s, the mainstream gay rights movement had fully severed those ties, which was a prerequisite for the cultural and political successes of the LGBT movement of today. In the 70s, the victims of child sexual abuse were largely invisible, they were not being heard in the conversation in the way they are now, and society (including much of the radical left) had not yet begun to take their experiences seriously.
What makes RMS a bit different, is that figures like Cohn-Bendit, Harman, Dromey and Hewitt, realised their mistake (or at least cared enough about social acceptability to move with the times.) RMS clung to this view long after it had become seriously socially unacceptable in a way it had not been in his twenties. Why?
Well, it is obvious to me that RMS has a lot of autistic traits (as do I myself). I'm not the only person to notice this – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20969320 – to arrive at and defend socially unpopular positions through application of abstract reasoning, completely divorced from real world human experience, and then to cling to them pigheadedly, is something a lot of people with autistic traits end up doing at some point. So I think his autistic traits are another big part of the picture here that other people may not be seeing.
RMS' former views were always wrong: I'm the father of two young kids myself, to me their wrongness is completely obvious. But I can understand how something which is completely obvious to me, even to most people, might not have been obvious to him, and why it might have taken some real world interaction with abuse victims for him to understand it. And, to the best of my knowledge, these wrong views of his were purely theoretical, I've never heard any claims he's actually acted on them, or even had any personal interest in acting on them – unlike someone like Allen Ginsberg.
I'm not saying this because I think he should be the leader of the free software movement. I think he has done an enormous amount for that movement, but it probably now would be better served by someone younger and more attuned to contemporary culture. But he's a human being, and I feel the urge to understand him sympathetically, rather than join in a mob out to get him.
There should always be room in society for someone to see the error of their ways and amend, but it's going to take more than a tweet's worth of text to make up for decades of - and let's be honest - sometimes passionate advocacy for reprehensible behavior, and the anecdotal evidence of creepy behavior towards women IRL, and that's not unreasonable. Sympathy doesn't mean one shouldn't expect growth.
Frankly speaking, I think most of the "normal mainstream" that condemned Stallman without even bothering to check up on and verify the facts of the accusations made against him outed themselves as easily manipulated, savage, and unstable individuals with little or no consideration for the damage they heaped upon a man who was doing nothing more than trying to encourage postponing of judgement until the facts were all in. In that one, tragically twisted-by-the-media email, Stallman did exactly what any civilized person who believes in the tenets of our system of justice should have done. He called for calm, and to give his friend the benefit of a doubt until all the facts were in. The "weird creepy guy" acted more in line with the ideal of normalcy than anyone else!
I'd take 100 more people just like him with all the inherent quirks than any of the mob who rushed to condemn him without even so much as getting to know him. I mean, good God. Show me someone who hasn't had a questionable view in their life from lack of reflection, and I'll show you someone who hasn't actively tried to get to know all the many facets of their species, or consciously come to terms with their own capacity for atrocity.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone! Til then, people need to nut up, shut up, and take a damn number. Thank who/whatever they worship they woke up this morning, and give thanks but that there for the Grace of $Subject_of_Worship go I.
Now get off my lawn, and keep your damn chickens out of my garden! They may be cute, but they're ruining my sprouts!
grumble grumble
If there were anything else, fanboys like you wouldn't hesitate to mention it every time you want to pull the "autism sympathy" card to make anyone who's been creeped out and offended by his behavior out to be " easily manipulated, savage, and unstable individuals" who can't comprehend the tragic, broken genius who's too good for this world.
The movement will be fine. The movement doesn't need him, and if it does, it's not a movement, it's a cult.
>I'd take 100 more people just like him with all the inherent quirks than any of the mob who rushed to condemn him without even so much as getting to know him.
Yes, well, you can have your hundred quirky middle aged pedophile apologists, as society seems to have enough to go around. I'll be satisfied when they're kept away from positions of authority and their behavior stops being defended by people around them. Just be sure to burn your sheets after they stay over.
Jesus Christ, get some perspective.
If the person is also resistant to discarding views merely because those views are hated, then, well, it's easy to see how their beliefs might end up where they do.
you may be surprised at some of the names here:
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/French_petition_against_age_of_c...
I'd bet you have to be really sloppy nowadays to get caught.
I don't think it is a black and white issue as much of a tool of entrapment. I am not pro possession of it, but the laws are clearly entrapping innocent people. Romeo and Juliet laws exist for underaged people, should a similar law exist if you make it yourself so you don't get labeled a sex offender for making a video of yourself?
During his time it was about not legislating everything. Dworkin who was anti pornography debated a conservative judge, who saw no difference of exploitation of children as of women. Here she debates a conservative judge on wanting to make it illegal. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zt8KVB8AunQ
I can find one thing I disagree with on anybody
Btw he wasn't even completely wrong on this one...
I'm not talking about the pedophilia comments, the sexual harassment of women in tech, or the toe jam. All those are well documented and don't need restating. No, if you look at the FSF's recent policies regarding software freedom, they are also bass-ackwards.
The FSF had a "respects your freedom" certification which is designed to encourage devices to be less free, thanks to a concession for blobs and proprietary firmware. Effectively, they know that it's impossible to build modern hardware without blobs, so instead what they did is require those blobs to be hidden, immutable, un-freeable, un-auditable. That way they can claim, for all the clueless free software evangelists, that the devices are 100% Free (because there are no closed blobs in /lib/firmware! They're just... elsewhere, where you can't see them, audit them, touch them, or actually replace them with a free version). I wrote up the story in this Twitter thread, it's crazy:
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1040626210999431168
Then there is also the AGPL, which isn't a Free Software license, but rather an end-user license agreement (EULA), because it violates Freedom Zero: the freedom to use software however you want. All free software licenses only impose restrictions on distribution, making them copyright licenses - you can use original or modified versions of e.g. GPLed software at will, with no condition, as long as you don't redistribute them to others. The AGPL requires advertising and offering source when used as a network server, which is a condition on usage, and thus incompatible with the Free Software definition. rms will never admit to this, but AGPL-licensed software is, by any reasonable reading of the Free Software definition, not Free Software, and shouldn't be included in the Debian main repository, for example. It's just that nobody seems to be able to read past the "AGPL is from the FSF so it must be free software" idea.
These are just some ways in which the FSF and rms are hurting their own cause. If you want to support an organization, I would recommend the FSFe instead of the FSF. The European branch is actually doing good work for free software advocacy, instead of all the nonsense the FSF is doing which only makes the movement look worse.
This is common in politics, so I don't blame you, but I don't think you're serving yourself or anyone else well.
Claiming that it is, though, sure sounds like a common dismissive tactic in politics, and especially when defending people who otherwise commit undesirable, even detestable public actions ("but he's a great guy, he'd never hurt anyone" etc).
If you have this opinion of the AGPL, then you should also have it about the GPL, since the only difference between the two is section 13 of both of them (seriously, just diff them) which says that conveying over a network also triggers copyleft. This is just a modernisation of plain ol' copyleft from the days when conveying was mostly done on physical media instead of over a network. If some day we discover a way to distribute software over neither a network nor physical medium (I can't imagine what that could be... quantum entanglement?), then the definition of "conveying" should be updated to reflect the new technology.
The GPL has long been considered open source by OSI and free software by the FSF. You are free to use the software however you want -- you're just not free to deny this freedom to your users or clients, with neither the GPL nor the AGPL.
You might think this is a valid clause to include, and like its effects, and that's fine (though a close reading of that AGPL clause reveals a myriad of problems; it's extremely poorly thought-out and I find it unlikely that it would survive in court if properly challenged, with many workarounds possible, or causing problems for normal usage, depending on interpretation). But it doesn't change the fact that, suddenly, it makes it into an EULA, since it imposes a condition on usage, not distribution.
The GPL and other Free Software licenses strictly give you rights. You have no right to copy software by default under copyright. Those licenses give you the right to do so, subject to certain conditions.
The AGPL removes rights. It removes the right to use (not distribute) the software as you wish if you do not follow certain conditions (that you don't modify it without making those modifications available to remote users who are otherwise not receiving a copy of the program anyway, and not invoking copyright).
Linux distributions should be including the AGPL as a click-through license when users request to install such software from the repositories. In the current status quo, users are required to abide by terms they haven't been required to read, and might accidentally violate the license by doing something that is otherwise legal, such as editing a script in /usr that is part of such an app and exposing it over the Internet.
It's not a requirement on users anymore than the GPL requiring you to distribute corresponding source on CDs was a requirement on users. Morally and legally, the distribution medium does not make a difference. When you make the software available over the network you are no longer the user -- the users of the software over the network are the users. When you convey the software over the network you are a network operator and a distributor. Being a network operator and a distributor imposes obligations upon you.
It is not a EULA. The AGPL even says, in the same section that the GPL says (to wit, section 9) that you don't need to accept it in order to be granted its rights.
If I give you a CD with nginx, I'm distributing it.
If I send you a .tar.gz with nginx, I'm distributing it.
If I bring up nginx on a server, put some HTML files in the webroot, and give you a URL to it, I am not distributing nginx. I am merely using nginx, and offering you a service using nginx. I am not offering nginx itself. I am distributing my HTML website, and I am merely using nginx for it.
Cases 1 and 2 invoke copyright. Case 3 does not. In the absence of a license, you are not allowed to do 1 nor 2, but you are allowed to do 3. I can give you software I created, say nothing whatsoever about its license (which means, implicitly, "all rights reserved"), and international copyright law says you can not do 1 nor 2, but you can do 3.
The GPL, BSD, and other free software copyright licenses say you can do 1 or 2, under certain conditions.
The AGPL, and other EULAs, says you can NOT do 3, unless you meet certain conditions (other EULAs may, for example, limit the number of users, which would be typical for typical proprietary software server EULAs; the AGPL limits how you can serve the software, in that you must provide source changes to users of the service).
Therefore, the GPL and BSD strictly grant rights (to copy). The AGPL both grants rights to copy and restricts rights to use. It is therefore not a copyright license, but a contract, an EULA, a click-through usage agreement. And anyone who treats it as a copyright license (i.e. users are not expected to care) is doing a disservice to their users, because they are, in fact, not allowed to use the software without abiding by that contract (license).
If nginx were AGPL-licensed (thankfully it isn't), and I made a change to the source for personal use, then the AGPL would require me to stick a download link to that modified source in the footer of every website served using that copy of nginx, even if I am not serving the nginx binary itself.
The GPL is already perfectly suited to cover distributing software on the internet, as tarballs or whatever. The GPLv2 had some outdated provisions referencing a "medium" and written offers (e.g. the CD story), and the GPLv3 already covered that by saying you can just send the source via the same medium as the binary, e.g. from a network server.
The AGPL is a very different beast, and it has nothing to do with updating the GPL to allow for network transmission of the source, as you seem to imply.
Have an example: I run a Nextcloud instance for personal use. It is AGPL-licensed. Thankfully I have not made any changes to the code. However, if I touch a single php file in my /var/www/nextcloud (other than config files - hopefully, the AGPL is too vague to say for sure), that means I now need to figure out how to package and distribute that change to literally every visitor to my instance, which could be anyone on the internet (even if they just hit the login page). This is NOT possible with a purely copyright license. And my distribution did not warn me about it (like they did for proprietary software EULAs, which require an explicit ack), because they erroneously believe that the AGPL is not an EULA, because the FSF wrote it.
Does this make sense now?
People add links to the source code because it's much less work than responding to emails. It's entirely voluntary. Users have a right to the source code of AGPL software you make accessible to them and you can satisfy that constraint any way you see fit.
> your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network [...] an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge [...]
An email does not cut it. It has to be a direct link to the source, or some kind of equivalent mechanism to directly download it from a server. Merely providing you the opportunity to ask a human for it does not cut it (an email bot might, but that'd be dumb).
It is an copyright offence to perform any of the following acts without permission of the owner:
Copy the work.
Rent, lend or issue copies of the work to the public.
Perform, broadcast or show the work in public.
*Adapt the work.*
You do not need permissions from a copyright license unless the action a person does falls within the scope of copyright. If a person don't copy, rent, lend, issue copies, perform, broadcast, show, or adapt the work, then the AGPL conditions are irrelevant because the user do not need permission in the first place. An EULA or contract however is not limited in this way and can restrict usage of a program outside the scope of copyright.
While it is true that copyright protects the right to create derivative works, that is, in practice, usually applied to creating such derivative works and distributing them. Otherwise, scribbling with a pen on a book you bought would be a copyright violation.
Similarly, while technically running a program requires copying it into memory (and thus requires a license), no court in this day and age is likely to rule that running software which was acquired legally, but which does not come with a license to run it, is a copyright violation.
The memory issue has been well discussed and handled in the past. The law has an explicit exception made with this in mind where legal owners of the software has a right to both copy and adapt software if it is an essential step towards utilization of the program. licensees however does not have this right and are restricted to the terms under the license. Naturally this is designed more towards the world of proprietary software where such distinction is more clear.
The AGPL attempts to control any changes made to the code, not just, say, a substantial refactoring or reworking. So in principle a one-line patch is sufficient to trigger AGPL clause 13.
Does it make sense now?
In fact, courts have repeatedly ruled that the output of software (i.e. the packets nginx sends over the network, but which aren't its own code) is not covered by the software's copyright itself.
If I lend you my phone, in the absence of more restrictive EULAs, and excluding media (which is reproduced verbatim by the phone), you are free to use any software on it without being subject to the copyright of said software.
Does it make sense now?
Does it make sense now?
You're grasping at straws here. There's provisions based on copyright, and then there's everything else. Redefining users to exclude the person running the server and implying that means the person running the server loses all rights under the Free Software definition is ludicrous.
Once you serve to other users, though, they also become users of nginx. In this regard, you have an upstream/downstream relationship between you and the other users of nginx that you've made users by giving them access over the network.
You are still free to use nginx for your military website or your online shop or whatever. Your usage of nginx has not been restricted for any purpose.
By granting network accesss to our hypothetically AGPLed nginx, though, you now have an AGPL obligation to provide a link to the source code of nginx, in case you modified that source yourself. This isn't taking any rights away from you -- indeed, the AGPL is only granting you rights. You wouldn't have the right to even serve nginx to other users or to modify its source code if it weren't for the AGPL.
None of this is substantially different from the GPL except for the method of interaction with the software.
Note that a shrink-wrap end-user license agreement from Adobe also doesn't take away your rights; it only grants you rights.
At least, according to copyright rhetoric.
Merely receiving a license-free piece of software (i.e. "all rights reserved") with no strings attached gives you a certain set of default rights (i.e. anything not in violation of copyright), such as to run it for any purpose. EULAs like a shrink-wrap agreement from Adobe, or the AGPL, then attempt to remove some of those rights.
Though, sure, you can look at it from the point of view that in the absence of a license at all, nobody would've been able to distribute the software to you in the first place, and therefore you'd have had no rights as a result.
Yet, the copyright law is what the AGPL is trying to wield as its basis.
It does not seem valid. Has anyone tested it in court?
I don't think that copyright can assert use restrictions. You cannot say that someone is not authorized to have a copy of something if they do not use it in such and such a way.
It's exactly like a "license" written in the flap of a book which says that you must read only the even-numbered pages. If you read any odd-numbered page, then you are breaching the license under which you're permitted to have a copy, and must destroy the book.
I would cheerfully deploy a modified AGPL program and not reveal the code to anyone. Nothing would happen at all.
I'm surprised Google are so allergic to the AGPL. If it came down to it, they could crush this bullshit in court like swatting a mosquito.
I trust Apple more than any party in the world. Even the government. Fortnight devs, Epic, whatever are not even on the same radar. They'll sell your privacy in milliseconds if they can get 2.5 cents for it.
I would never ever own an open source phone. Not because the operating system is open source (probably good that it has eyes on it) but there is no way to control third-party apps. Even the os builds can get hacked and I cannot trust it. I have so much personal stuff on my phone on it that I cannot afford to entertain Richard Stallman and his righteousness.
That opinion is likely to be a bit of an outlier, heh.
If not for IME, I could have a computer under my control, running software guaranteed to be free from the Trusting Trust attack, right now.
People like yourself can probably manage their own security, have a secure NAS, multiple firewalls, etc.
Do you see it from the perspective of average Joe (or me)?
I usually choose to trust them, because it's convenient and because they probably know better than I do. But my trust in Debian is completely voluntary, non-exclusive and revocable.
This doesn't need to be an either/or situation. You can outsource your security and privacy decisions to Apple while simultaneously allowing others to take full control of their devices.
Given the conditions of how ignorant large percentage (~ 99.999%) of the Apple customers are, I would trust Apple more than any other party to keep them and myself safe.
Can you imagine third parties siphoning off data, metrics, photos, etc. without Apple safe guarding user's interest?
I would pay a lot of premium for security if I don't have to do it myself.
I am not saying that Apple is not prone to hacks, gov influence, but based on their past record, their stance on privacy - who else could be more trust worthy?
Can you provide examples of whom you would trust more if you owned an iPhone to manage your phone?
I agree that things like openssh can be more secure because there is a huge number of individuals and corporations using it, there are a lot of eyes on it. It is open source and secure.
That's not the same as something as big as an iPhone. iPhone is an ecosystem of apps, cloud data, biometrics, hardware encryption (secure enclave), etc. and finally the physical device.
I rather use my brain cycles for something else. This is compounded for people who have no interest in tech but rather just want to use them to perform certain tasks.
Are some of practices unfair sometimes to a small subset of companies/developers. Definitely yes, But what are the other options that have this level of privacy or trust worthiness with a similar ease of use/setup. I don't know of any.
It's more or less choosing the lesser evil.
It would be interesting to see if these users views stack up in practice or these are just beliefs that are not practically demonstrable.
Dev tries to make it super flexible, tries to make it fancy, implement DRY like one's life is dependent on it ultimately resulting in a hard to read/maintain messed up spaghetti code.
Also i don't see how can a person know all of the security stuff with a beast like Android unless they spent/are willing to spend an insane amount of time on keeping up latest exploits, architecture etc.
Sometimes choices are not a good thing.
The power you're talking about (and the risk you're not talking about) are of no value to me.
Fortnite tried pushing people to side-load on Android is a perfect example.
Even though that step failed, still a lot of people did side-load without knowing what they were doing and that's a problem.
Your phone's security will not be compromised by adding an extra optional feature.
Like root certificates, you have to trust someone, at some point. I am choosing to trust Apple.
By allowing side-loading apps, that is eroded, even if the tiniest bit.