Yet, this program did something totally unexpected by all who had tried it, purchased it, depended on it. Obviously, to back up your Gmail account it had to prompt for your Gmail username and password. It then dutily e-mailed these to the program’s author!

Such a thing could never happen in open source. It would have been detected almost immediately and the software slammed. New revisions would have been produced by others, with purer source code. The community would act fast and prevent any breach.

I argued this was a violation of trust. And while Apple’s Safari installation is definitely not in the same league as sending your credentials to another, the fact is the Apple Software Update is still doing something which is unexpected to the user and is contrary to the product’s stated purpose.

Not only this, but open source apps tend to err on the side of requiring user action to make changes. During the ever-popular Ubuntu distro installation, an “Advanced” tab gives the option to participate in the package popularity contest. That is, checking the box will register your vote for Ubuntu. This could have been turned on by default. The same argument would apply that “Oh, it is easy to turn it off” but Ubuntu’s developers have leaned to the safer approach of letting users decide what they do and do not wish to happen.

Going further, clicking Ubuntu’s System/Administration/Synaptic Package Manager (or the equivalent package manager on any other distro) brings forth the large list of available software for use. Synaptic will helpfully advise each package you have installed and for which a newer version is now available. Yet, it won’t pre-select any item for you. A button “Mark All Upgrades” will do the trick, but again the choice has been left in the hands of the users not the developers. This is also true for new software items; the user must manually select what they would like.

In open source, the trend is to minimal change; it is the user’s computer. It is the user’s system. Software is a tool designed to aid the user in achieving their objectives. Software update tools can suggest and advise and make recommendations but should tend to leave a system unchanged unless the user specifically acts.

This is where Apple have come undone; no doubt Safari usage statistics may increase as a result of their aggressive marketing strategy but certainly at the price of leaving a lot of users with a bitter taste in their mouth at what is widely seen as a downward trend to practices which Apple had generally been seen as being above.