mbr

I was under the impression that FSF had a collection of patents that have been donated to them. If so, can it really be true that Apple's not violating any of them? Proprietary companies use their patents to blackmail one another into cross-licensing all the time. Although it's offensive, it's how business operates. Why can't FSF do the same for the greater good of fostering the establishment of standards that will benefit the Free Software community and the public at large?

Your wife and all non-programmers get a major benefit when they use free software. When your wife uses proprietary software, she can never have any level of confidence that the software does what it claims to do and nothing more. Microsoft or Apple can do anything they want behind her back, and the only chance she'll ever have of knowing about it is if some disgruntled employee decides to spill the beans and doesn't immediately get silenced by Microsoft or Apple's huge legal team.

But when she uses a program whose the source code can be examined by a worldwide community of programmers, her chances are greatly improved that if the code plays any dirty tricks someone will already have discovered the offending code, they will have screamed bloody murder, and the offending code will already have been removed. Even if she's unfortunate enough to have encountered the malicious code before it's been discovered, she can be confident that when it is discovered: 1) it will quickly be fixed, and 2) since it's in Microsoft's and Apple's interests to disparage F/OSS software, it will be prominently reported on the 11:00 news.

I'm certainly not claiming that there's any absolute guarantee that any software is safe. If you really want to be paranoid, read Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.167....

But I am claiming that her chances of being harmed by having her data misused are far, far greater when she uses software that can only be examined by a very few programmers inside an organization that has a vested interest in hiding the misuse. She's much safer when she uses software that can be examined by a worldwide community of programmers whose vested interest is in achieving status within the programmer community by producing code they can be proud of.