OS X and iOS are not jails | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

And TUAW just keeps losing credibility as anything other than rapid Apple fanboys.

The author says that they have a car that they don't understand and couldn't do anything to even if they did, but they don't miss their old impala. It makes sense that you don't want a crappy car, but that doesn't mean that you DO want a car that requires you to overpay the only mechanic in town who understands it.

This entire argument is just one big logical fallacy based around the idea that the only two options are "free software wild-west" vs "smooth user experience". Those are not two ends of a spectrum, nor are they mutually exclusive.

It's unfortunate the author leaps from Stallman's "computer as a jail" comment to this:

"It's at this point that I have to wonder whether Stallman or any of the other members of the free software movement have ever spent any appreciable amount of time in an actual jail or jail-like environment. "

This, despite linking to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jail_(computer_security) in the very first paragraph.

Sigh.