Comment Re:not great, but probably not very important eith (Score 1) 105
So who should own the text file? Vi? cat? grep? emacs? gcc?
Those are applications which have nothing to do with ownership although the user must have permission to use them. It is the user who should own the file, text or otherwise.
The Unix permissions of "user", "group" and "other" are still valid even today. If you want a more fine grained permission solution then look no further than Access Control Lists which have been in use by Unix since the late 1980's and Linux since the early 1990's.
The big problem with ACL's is not the concept it is when users expect the System Administrator to manage ACL's for them. Even on the latest OS's be it Linux, MS Windows, VMS or Unix the same base Unix permissions are still in use with ACL's only used when there is a need.