Please don’t port philosophy with code!

“One of my pet peeves is Linux installers for proprietary
software requiring root permissions.

“Last time, Adobe got me into rant mode by requiring root not
only to install the Adobe Air runtime, but to install any Adobe Air
based application as well. This time it’s Abbyy – makers of
the famous Finereader OCR software.

“Before I start explaining what’s so bad about requiring root
for installing, I want to give a short disclaimer:

“I’m not against non-Open Source software running on Linux. It
isn’t my first choice for sure, but sometimes there are no
alternatives available and I’m happy about every company providing
a Linux port of their software. Even when it is closed source.

“This is also not against Abbyy. They just happen to be the most
recent example I encountered. On the contrary – I’m a fan of
Finereader, Abbyy is using DokuWiki at ocr4linux and they made a
generous donation to the project. I like Abbyy.”

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