Re:Reddit and LinkedIn apps also caught copying and pasting ...
by Silhouette on Friday July 03, 2020 @03:02PM
(#23726521)
Insofar as nobody's currently making money selling a desktop OS to consumers...there's nobody incentivized to protect the wellbeing of individual customers on the desktop.
This looks like the root cause of the problem, except that in reality users are still paying for their OSes in many cases, it's just bundled in with the cost of the equipment and they don't see it as a separate line item.
However, given the huge barrier to entry for any new competitor, not only in building a better OS but also in developing the ecosystem around it, I am increasingly sceptical that this offers a realistic route out of the current hole we find ourselves in, at least not any time soon. That's why I favour better public education, and ultimately relying on competitive and/or statutory forces to push developers in a healthier (for customers/society) direction.
If you think in terms of who the paying customers were/are for desktop OSes (by-and-large, corporations and governments), the "threats of several decades ago" were—and continue to be—real threats to them (vis. industrial espionage/cyberwar); whereas the modern "threats" aren't things that threaten their interests at all, "only" things that affect the lives of individuals. A corporation won't lose money because a rival knows everything about its employees shopping habits.
Insofar as nobody's currently making money selling a desktop OS to consumers (Microsoft sells cloud with the OS as a loss-leader; Apple sells the hardware with the OS as a cost-center; and RedHat, Canonical, VMWare, etc. only make money from enterprise support) there's nobody incentivized to protect the wellbeing of individual customers on the desktop.