Granted, my old recollection was largely that the "privileged" ports were that way because they were blessed by the routing tables, at the time. The entire point was that the lower ports were expected to be connectable to external machines. Not shocking if I am out of date there.
I know this is subtle but if you take a step back, user-mode TCP/IP moots the policies we're talking about; it doesn't subvert them. There are no security or policy implications to e.g. binding a low-numbered port on an IP address unrelated to your physical computer that is allocated directly to a running instance of your program. There are (archaic) implications to binding that port on an actual interface of your machine, because that binding (archaically) stood in for an assertion of identity/authority back in the 1990s.
Sorta? If it renders them moot, why not attack the policies? For that matter, if there are no implications to the number of the port, I'm again forced to ask why not just use the higher numbers? Wouldn't that have let you use the "simplicity of standard socket code" with no extra effort?
(This is also a new use of "moot" to me? You seem to be offering it as a synonym of obsolete? But a "moot" debate is one that is closer to "overcome by events" than one that is not relevant. Right?)
You get that these are just people shipping a program that random people are going to run on random computers, right? If your go-to-market involves "reversing longstanding Unix network policy rules", you have problems.
Respectfully, if at this point the situation hasn't been made clear to you, I don't think there's much more to productively discuss.
Doesn't this program need to bind a UDP port on your machine? If policies prevent you binding ports I don't see how you'd be able to use this software...
I have no idea what you're talking about. We're talking about essentially fictitious IP addresses on synthetic machines. I think everyone's talking past each other here.
And if you don't want to, that feels misguided?
Granted, my old recollection was largely that the "privileged" ports were that way because they were blessed by the routing tables, at the time. The entire point was that the lower ports were expected to be connectable to external machines. Not shocking if I am out of date there.