This does seem like some crazy, left-wing, "we'll protect you from yourself", find-someone-else-to-blame, I'm-not-at-fault-because-you-didn't-fix-me idea. You seem to be missing a very important aspect of open-source: To ride the train, you must buy a ticket. The ticket cost is personal responsibility. If someone isn't responsible enough to pay the ticket price, they deserve what they get. I don't care at all how many times my machine is probed, even if it was in the last 25 hours of when you wrote this article. If I'm vulnerable, if I'm not doing my job, I deserve to be haxored. Your idea seems like a page from the Daschle-Gephardt playbook, "Personal Responsibility is Bad" (©2000).

I'm shocked that this came out of you, bud. Of course, after your last article, I shouldn't be.

The truth of the matter is that people expect computers to be self-sufficient. People really want computers to be smarter than they are. Look at the Microsoft phenom: people want a GUI to do the job for them, and all they do is move the mouse and pretend to actually do something. If the computer breaks, they become really happy! Then it is absolutely not their fault if their job isn't done.

Now you want this to happen on the Open Source front?

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/72/11607#11607