@michaaa62,

While I tend to agree with what you've written, we need to remind ourselves that the N900 (with Maemo5) is not a smartphone but a mobile Linux box.

All this "app permissions" stuff comes from the realm of smartphones (Symbian, Android, iOS, etc.) You (normally) don't have such systems under normal Linux.

Most user programs in Maemo run under the "user" credentials (like in any other linux).

The only way for a (user) program to become root without user intervention is when said program has been added to the sudoers list (either by the user or by postinstall) -- OK, or by setting the setuid bit, but this happens very rarely, and mostly manually --

Programs that are in the sudoers list are usually there for a reason, so there's not much we can do about that.

One could of course create new application-specific users/groups and configure applications to run as an application-specific user, but then you'd have to tweak a lot so that those applications also can display on the ("user"-owned) X session (or perhaps running a separate X session on a separate VT, don't know if this is possible with Maemo).

In short: your average Linux box behaviour.