[jacquesm]

> Did you, dear sysadmin, pay anything for Google Chrome? No? Are you in any contractual relation to Google that covers your use of Chrome?

The idea that because you did not pay anything for a product translates into 'you have no rights' really is getting old. Even if you don't pay you have plenty of rights and the provider of the software should not - and in many places can not - walk away claiming that because you did not pay you have no rights. It may not be the rights that you want, and it may very well be that certain behavior even if you don't like it is allowed but it just simply isn't true that you have no rights.

And that contractual bit runs both ways: companies have tried to argue time and again that free users of websites and software products were bound by EULAs, that means you can't now turn around and suddenly claim that there is no contractual relationship. Yes, there is no paper contract. But you are in a relationship and if Google or any other provider claims that they have rights by the definition of the word 'consideration' so do you.

[Slartie]

That is a straw man argument. We are not talking about an incident that may in any way be covered by the rights you might have against Google even though you did only use a free piece of software - like for example the right to not be actively and intentionally harmed by Google (think of using Chrome as trojan horse to infiltrate your network).

I am not doubting that such rights exist. But I am doubting that you have any legal right to demand Google to not enable a generally non-destructive and well-intentioned feature in some randomly chosen installations of the software that just by bad luck happens to have a bug which makes the software non-functional (but not actively harmful) in your particular terminal server environment. There clearly was no malicious intent behind this particular issue, and Google is not obliged to test every single feature on every possible combinations of systems, including every kind of remote terminal solution imaginable.

And, having established that the legal system does not help you here, I additionally doubt that you have any other leverage over Google to make them not do such feature enablements in randomly chosen installations if you don't pay for the software and if you don't happen to be a company of huge size (which might allow you to threaten to switch your hundreds of thousands of users to a different browser). But if you paid for it, Google just might be interested in keeping that cashflow flowing, and thus might be inclined to put the additional effort in to create an option for you to disable these random feature enablements, and/or to disable them outright for the paid Enterprise installations.

[jacquesm]

You wrote "You are not a customer, hence you aren't really in any position to demand anything. "

So don't go around now claiming straw man arguments. Clearly, and you seem to agree, you do have rights, and whether or not that particular right is yours remains to be seen. I can see several ways in which it just might be so that you have that right based on your expectations of performance and that a near-monopolist like Google is walking on very brittle eggs the day they start using their position to perform unsanctioned experiments on the population at large, especially when those experiments can't be opted out of.

[Slartie]

It is a straw man because you are obviously dragging this into the realm of defending against malicious intent from Google, which clearly does not apply here. The near-monopolist argument by which you attempt to construct a "right" to demand anything more than omission of malicious behavior does not hold water: Google does not have a monopoly (or a near-monopoly) on the browser market, there are Firefox and Edge, of which both are fit for use in enterprise environments, regularly patched and compatible with practically any website out there, including even those from Google.

[colejohnson66]

From the dictionary:

> straw man (n):

> an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument.

So, no, it isn’t a straw man because he’s not manipulating/misrepresenting your argument. Whether an argument is about defending malicious behavior or not has no bearing on whether or not it’s a straw man.

[Slartie]

Moving the argument, which has been about a user of a free software program having neither an actual nor a moral capability of demanding that the free software fits their particular needs (which in this case means to work as a critical part of their business and continue working as such under their particular environment) into the legal realm and making it into a proposition that a user of a free software has no rights at all, not even legal rights to defend against malicious behavior of the producer of the software, is an intentional misrepresentation of the argument, and it is easier to defeat than the actual argument since there are clearly such defensive rights.