Thanks!

Assume that the "philosophical" portion includes fixing the very overly broad scope of 9b in the User Agreement .

This seems a better idea.
A password would be just useless for normal users and an issue for advanced ones.

It is really good news. They basically said:

1. We agree with your concerns and we'll remove the passwords while we look for a better solution.

2. Officially, our Windows installers are for Windows users. We won't put up any roadblocks (like passwords), but we also can't officially support non-Windows uses of them. (e.g. No time spent on testing to see whether installer config X or Y gets along better with Wine)

3. No matter how well your tools work, our primary concern with Windows installers is giving Windows users the best possible experience. If we have to choose between keeping non-Windows install scripts working and changing to an installer that makes life easier for Windows users, you'll just have to play catch-up. (i.e. We reserve the right to change things again as needed.)

(To clarify point #3, Gowor said that the whole point of the switch to RAR was to allow GOG install techs to apply small, incremental fixes to the installer while preparing a new release without having to rebuild what could be several DVDs worth of BIN files from scratch. As I understand it, the password was just a poor attempt to get back some of the authenticity verification they lost in the process.)

Crisis averted. We can continue our heartful celebration of 100% DRM-free gaming.

Thanks for looking into this to resolve the issue positively! And especially thanks for reassuring your stance on DRM-free approach here.

Thanks. I use wine, installers mostly just work as intended.
Except for THIEF:DS this one I never managed to install properly.

GOG, your concern for us nerds is deeply appreciated. Back to our regularly scheduled programming of buying butt-tons of games. <3

Thank you GOG, for really respecting your users and responding to your customers' feedback. :-)

True, currently these overly strict standard EULA formulations are disturbingly GOG unworthy (and differentiate not between GOG infrastructure/services and GOG content, but should!) From GOG I expect some customer respecting positive formulation like e.g.
"We want that you enjoy your bought GOG content in all forms you like ("Do whatever you want"), beside redistribution, commercialization and taking false attribution, limited only by law and potentially a GOG content specific EULA."

;-) You can do it!

During download is like how Steam verifies cache? What if alternative downloader is used? During installation is understandable.

Ok.

The easiest way to detect the tampered installer is probably through the aforementioned checksums.

It's up to torrent packers to decide if it is full of malware. So this teaching method is unreliable.

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So far this is the only post that actually offered suggestions in response to the GOG's post. All other posts (including the activists', whose usernames begin with 's') are just lazy thanks. Disappointing.

There have been many suggestions in this thread posted by users whose usernames start with an "s".

But sorry, I shouldn't have replied, I'm just a lowly D. ;-)

The keyphrase is: 'in response'.

The majority of previous ~25-pages posts is 'Down with password protection' that needs to be shuffled through.

I guess I see the thing: separate thread should be started for suggestions, so thanks can go here, suggestions there, so it's clear and consistent, yay!

But then GOG would need to edit the post...

Well, there was this one, but I guess it got forgotten.

Did you see this thread? A lot of suggestions were also voiced in this thread too. If you didn't spend time reading it, it doesn't mean that they weren't.