> Companies have no business telling their employees which specific programs they can [run]
Agreed.
> and cannot run
I strongly disagree. I think those controls are great for denylists. For example, almost no one needs to run a BitTorrent client on their work laptops. (I said almost. If you’re one of them, make a case to your IT department.) Why allow it? Its presence vastly increases the odds of someone downloading porn (risk: sexual harassment) or warez (risks: malware, legal issues) with almost no upside to the company. I’m ok with a company denylisting those.
I couldn’t care less if you want to listen to Apple Music or Spotify while you work. Go for it. Even though it’s not strictly work-related, it makes happier employees with no significant downside. Want to use Zed instead of VSCode? Knock yourself out. I have no interest in maintaining an allowlist of vetted software. That’s awful for everyone involved. I absolutely don’t want anyone running even a dev version of anything Oracle in our non-Oracle shop, though, and tools to prevent that are welcome.
Agreed.
> and cannot run
I strongly disagree. I think those controls are great for denylists. For example, almost no one needs to run a BitTorrent client on their work laptops. (I said almost. If you’re one of them, make a case to your IT department.) Why allow it? Its presence vastly increases the odds of someone downloading porn (risk: sexual harassment) or warez (risks: malware, legal issues) with almost no upside to the company. I’m ok with a company denylisting those.
I couldn’t care less if you want to listen to Apple Music or Spotify while you work. Go for it. Even though it’s not strictly work-related, it makes happier employees with no significant downside. Want to use Zed instead of VSCode? Knock yourself out. I have no interest in maintaining an allowlist of vetted software. That’s awful for everyone involved. I absolutely don’t want anyone running even a dev version of anything Oracle in our non-Oracle shop, though, and tools to prevent that are welcome.