[Nottingham] Microsoft EULA simplified?

[Jim Moore]

a thought crosses this fragile little mind - that freedom (to do as
one will) and security (against things going very wrong) are mutually
exclusive goals. Some things you'd like to do on a computer might
involve changes to important aspects of its function, such as
configuring the UI experience, tweaking pagefile usage, even changing
the screen resolution to optimise for gaming or watching video. Even
moderately savvy users enjoy such freedoms, yet locking down a machine
to the point where it's basically user-indestructible would restrict
the ability to do pretty much anything beyond browsing basic HTML
webpages... and forget writing directly to video memory!

As sometimes misattributed to Ben Franklin:
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security,
deserve neither liberty or security."

Could one have complete liberty (ie digital anarchy) on a networked
workstation and expect it to be secure? I would say not - look at the
several hundred million Microsoft-powered platforms out there and
point to one at random, and tell me that it's secure. Tell me that Mr.
Average Computer User can't break it inside a minute (or three).

As a practical demonstration of the fragility of said platform, let it
be recorded that my wife, who is completely computer-backward (she
actually has trouble finding the "ON" button on my laptops), has the
record for breaking an OS in my house of 46 seconds. That OS was
released onto an unsuspecting world by a large company based out of
Redmond.

I'm trying not to rant here, there's so much bad stuff I could say
about Microsoft Windows from firsthand experience of having to deal
with its foibles and failures on others' machines, but I don't think
the list server could handle the volume of data... ;)

On 7/10/09, Martin <martin at ml1.co.uk> wrote:
> Martin wrote:
> [...]
>> That is, give unfettered 'freedom' to the user to play as they please on
>> their machines but still keep them safe from meddling by malware or
>> Marketeers or others?
>
> Another thought is whether Linux distros can survive the silliness and
> widespread use of badly (or Marketing steered, or maliciously) written
> 3rd-party/commercial applications pushed onto the unknowing masses...?
>
> Will linux be linux if used like Windows? I guess we've had the
> lindows/linspire experiment...
>
> Imagine a world with an /equal/ market share of Linux, BSD, Google-OS,
> Mac-OS, Windows? Possible? Good for Linux?
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
> --
> ----------------
> Martin Lomas
> martin at ml1.co.uk
> ----------------
>
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