[meowface]

>In my current company, the sysops still limit what they support - for example, they're not willing to support OS X Yosemite users yet, and recommend users stay on Mavericks. But, if you want to upgrade to Yosemite, you can, just don't ask the sysops for help fixing it. And if your broken Yosemite install is impeding your work, well, we trust that you'll resolve it one way or another.

Sorry, but as someone who works in IT security, this sounds like an absolute nightmare. Even if you have a small company comprised only of intelligent developers, those developers do not necessarily understand the latest malware threats or what sorts of software can introduce risks. Wide-open FTP servers and Tomcat servers with default passwords are a major issue. I would actually say developers probably introduce more threats into our environment than any other demographic.

Whitelisting software installs from specific domains (google.com, mozilla.org) is okay, but a carte blanche policy is usually a very bad idea.