[pjc50]

Sandstorm is interesting, but fundamentally the dichotomy is "leave the running to someone else" vs. "spend significant time and effort acquiring the skills to make your own administrative decisions".

If you're running on someone else's platform and automatically accepting updates, are you really "administering" it yourself?

[seagreen]

Nope! But that's OK:)

A majority of people will never develop any real skill level at administering servers. We still need them to be able to use reasonably humane software though, because the consumer software industry revolves around them. If they continue to be easy pickings for predatory software (lock-in, etc.) the incentive for industry will be to continue improving at making predatory software . . . not ideal.

So empowering normal users (even partially, Sandstorm certainly doesn't give as much freedom as becoming a unix guru or whatever) is good for expert users too.