Even if I don't need to hack the kernel, knowing that I can affords me a level of self-sufficiency and insulation from vendors' whims that fixed system software, such as Windows', does not.

Apple is in the unique position of losing hardware sales to software pirates. It faces the risk of cloned Macs being distributed in foreign markets where intellectual property protection is weak. I empathize. But there are ways to address the piracy issue without stripping the critical and defining quality of openness from OS X. That's a subject addressed in my Enterprise Mac blog (http://infoworld.com/3838).

I hope it's discussed at Apple so that OS X's openness can be pulled from its state of flux and restored to the state that OS X's most demanding users expect and deserve.