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Originally Posted by TadW
I really don't like this. But it seems it's our better chance to stand against current and future iRex efforts to sabotage our work.
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There has been no sabotage as far as I can see. The root password was a real security problem to be fixed even in their architecture: most university networks (and other unsecure industries) are crowned of worms in the local network, randomly trying for trivial holes in any connected machine. Worse, it is unlikely that a worm rightly identifies an ARM machine, so a sucessful authomated attack could install wrong binaries.
The second isue is the pdf. It is not actually a sabotage but a bug: if they do not react to hotlinks, they are not following the full pdf specifications; and there are a lot of pdfs having jumps to the footnotes and back and similar, such kind of pdf will we problematic in the iRex reader. Of course if they allow pdf-originated jumps, they have problems to control the page number. But a swift approach would be to patch the xpdf itself to output the current page number.
The 2.4 OS took control of user input over after some button was pressed; now the 2.5 takes control before, at visualisation time.
As for the question of this thread: the answer, if we are advocating for free software (with 'free' in the sense of freedom, the four freedoms and all that), the logical answer is a 'no'; the whole point is that the adventages of open development largely outweight any potential disadventage (furthermore in this particular case, where hardware patents protect iRex, one can not see how potential disadventages apply, but that should be another history to discuss).