This concept that theft has to be prevented is fundamentally flawed and in contrast to our legal system, which doesn't punish offenders until after they've committed the crime.
Let's perform some reductio ad absurdum on the the "theft has to be prevented" Mindset: Murder needs to be prevented, so let's prevent murder by simply putting everybody in prison! This will definitively ensure that all the murderers out there will be caught...
I wonder if what they meant was "our site looks like crap in firefox so please don't use it". Or maybe by "poses a security risk" they mean "the secret fields we spent hours figuring out how to hide behind other stuff refuses to stay hidden in firefox, so using it is a risk to OUR security".
This all goes in much the same vein as a failure notice email I got from ebay the other day, telling me that my PGP-signed email had been blocked for 'security reasons', in order to prevent identity theft. As far as I can see this is complete crap, and what they really mean to say is "we can't read emails which aren't sent in cleartext, thus PGP is bad". Basically what it comes down to is relying on the average user's general ignorance, and the terror associated with the repeatedly-drummed-in phrase "security risk"...
There have been many interesting points of view raised here.
The concensus seems to be that FOSS is a race to Zero, and I agree. I also think that this is a good thing.
I recall some years ago there was a piece of commercial software around called "Notepad Plus", and more recently another one which did source highliting and all kinds of nice stuff. I can't remember the name of that one, but it had a frog for it's icon.
Now, there's SciTE, which is absolutely fantastic. Since discovering SciTE I haven't looked back. This is an example of the 'race to zero' you're talking about.
I'm a software developer, and more recently I've become a bit of a FOSS zealot - I've contributed a couple of things to FOSS projects, but not much yet. The way I look at it, when you contribute to an OSS project you're giving something back, but if you use OSS then your contribution is very likely to be a very small percentage of the total amount of work you benefit from. and Free software works for everybody's benefit, except perhaps the developer.
Alot of people seem to think that you have to shift from doing software development to doing development and support if you want to stay solvent in the coming world where all software is FOSS. but I disagree.
There are people (like me!) who despise doing support, and would much prefer to write documentation and simply deal with very high level "This has been confirmed as a bug" type stuff rather than providing support, so not everybody is going to find this shift in emphasis away from development to be attractive.
Secondly, A position like mine will never go away. I work in a non-IT office, writing and supporting code which is very specific to the office I'm working in - this stuff will pretty much never be replaced by FOSS, regardless of what innovative software somebody comes up with. I'll still be needed to do all the stuff which is very specific to my office, even if commercial software has gone the way of the dodo.
Thirdly, there will still be a requirement for innovation and development, even after all software hits $0, there will still be companies who need things done. For example, IBM might want a capability added to a filesystem or a database, and the best way to achieve that will be to hire a bunch of people to do it. So perhaps software will be driven by what business wants rather than what some marketing team thinks the consumer wants, but I really don't think that the job of the software developer is going to go away any time soon.
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Theft has to be prevented somehow.
See, there's your problem!
This concept that theft has to be prevented is fundamentally flawed and in contrast to our legal system, which doesn't punish offenders until after they've committed the crime.
Let's perform some reductio ad absurdum on the the "theft has to be prevented" Mindset:
Murder needs to be prevented, so let's prevent murder by simply putting everybody in prison! This will definitively ensure that all the murderers out there will be caught...
I wonder if what they meant was "our site looks like crap in firefox so please don't use it". Or maybe by "poses a security risk" they mean "the secret fields we spent hours figuring out how to hide behind other stuff refuses to stay hidden in firefox, so using it is a risk to OUR security".
This all goes in much the same vein as a failure notice email I got from ebay the other day, telling me that my PGP-signed email had been blocked for 'security reasons', in order to prevent identity theft. As far as I can see this is complete crap, and what they really mean to say is "we can't read emails which aren't sent in cleartext, thus PGP is bad". Basically what it comes down to is relying on the average user's general ignorance, and the terror associated with the repeatedly-drummed-in phrase "security risk"...
There have been many interesting points of view raised here. The concensus seems to be that FOSS is a race to Zero, and I agree. I also think that this is a good thing. I recall some years ago there was a piece of commercial software around called "Notepad Plus", and more recently another one which did source highliting and all kinds of nice stuff. I can't remember the name of that one, but it had a frog for it's icon. Now, there's SciTE, which is absolutely fantastic. Since discovering SciTE I haven't looked back. This is an example of the 'race to zero' you're talking about. I'm a software developer, and more recently I've become a bit of a FOSS zealot - I've contributed a couple of things to FOSS projects, but not much yet. The way I look at it, when you contribute to an OSS project you're giving something back, but if you use OSS then your contribution is very likely to be a very small percentage of the total amount of work you benefit from. and Free software works for everybody's benefit, except perhaps the developer. Alot of people seem to think that you have to shift from doing software development to doing development and support if you want to stay solvent in the coming world where all software is FOSS. but I disagree. There are people (like me!) who despise doing support, and would much prefer to write documentation and simply deal with very high level "This has been confirmed as a bug" type stuff rather than providing support, so not everybody is going to find this shift in emphasis away from development to be attractive. Secondly, A position like mine will never go away. I work in a non-IT office, writing and supporting code which is very specific to the office I'm working in - this stuff will pretty much never be replaced by FOSS, regardless of what innovative software somebody comes up with. I'll still be needed to do all the stuff which is very specific to my office, even if commercial software has gone the way of the dodo. Thirdly, there will still be a requirement for innovation and development, even after all software hits $0, there will still be companies who need things done. For example, IBM might want a capability added to a filesystem or a database, and the best way to achieve that will be to hire a bunch of people to do it. So perhaps software will be driven by what business wants rather than what some marketing team thinks the consumer wants, but I really don't think that the job of the software developer is going to go away any time soon.
My Packard Bell FastMedia remote hasn't worked with windows since Windows 2000 came out, but I still use it to this day with LIRC on my Fedora box.