I though he was a bit extreme at the time, but over time I've come to appreciate his position. Having software be open and modifiable is really quite an amazing thing. those open building blocks lets us do amazing things with software quite easily.
Its time for an open source desktop os and software to go mainstream. We realize that apple is not reliable making developer grade notebooks and their unix underpinnings show that it is possible. Then onto phones. I feel open source software will keep the hardware from being too weird
It is frustrating that we still can't really get full control of the hardware, but at least from the kernel on up we can have pretty complete control of software.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Couldn't find anything specific in re: auto-updates though...