> It's not any different from, say, reading a website whose server software is unreleased, but whose client-side JS is all Free Software.
I think that an important difference here is that there are FOSS Web servers that are compatible with your browser, but there's no FOSS servers compatible with your Snap client.
> Epic Games is still pushing their lawsuit from the perspective of a proprietary software vendor, just one that's willing to go rogue.
I agree that Epic is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, but that doesn't make what they want wrong.
> My point is that if you are extremely opposed to proprietary software in any form and for any reason whatsoever, then Apple's argument against sideloading is actually more reasonable, because it's the enemy eating itself.
I still don't see how, since the ban on sideloading affects FOSS apps too. Remember the old issue with VLC in the App Store?
> The whole owner override thing I mentioned above took a lot of time and effort, just so they could boil the secure boot frog less. It would have been far easier for them to just say "no, we're only allowing macOS to live in EL2".
If they didn't do the owner override thing originally, then a lot of people might have jumped ship and forced them to backtrack. By taking the approach they did, they'll later say something like "look, our telemetry says 95% of Macs still have SIP enabled, so now we're going to make it mandatory".
> The part that actually checks to make sure the code you're running was owner-signed needs to be both immutable from the perspective of malware and updatable in case of security bugs.
> The only complaint I have about the way Apple did this is that they really should Free their boot chain code and have verifiable builds for it.
But those requirements are fundamentally incompatible with freedom. I'd rather not have that sort of "security". And your complaint doesn't address the tivoization problem at all.