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Richard Stallman's Dissenting View of Steve Jobs
Garabito writes "Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has posted his not-so-fond memories of Steve Jobs on his personal site, saying, 'As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.' His statement has spurred reaction from the community; some even asking to the Free Software movement to find a new voice."
It's interesting that persons promoting freedom want to restrict what other people do. This is also why I like BSD license more than GPL. It is truly free software license, while GPL tries to restrict what people can do with software and code. On top of that they don't seem to understand that usability and UI's matter A LOT. Face it, interfaces and user experience has always been horrible with FOSS software. Ubuntu has tried to fix that with Linux, but it's still far from Mac OSX or even Windows. Even I hate that interface. This is why companies have actual persons working solely on interfaces, user experience and usability - it's an important thing. With FOSS software the author just throwns in together quickly, with some menu items or buttons sometimes just as a placeholder that do nothing!
I'm not exactly fan of Apple, but Richard Stallman has no merits to basically say he's glad Steve Jobs is dead. Apart from the fact that it is completely stupid thing to say, he just seems jealous that people like Jobs' products and ideas better. The fact is, apart from the a few geeks, people in the real world really don't care about his views or what he is trying to promote.
When people, even some geeks, think about Apple's products they just think they can go to a store and buy a device that will work straight away and is guaranteed to have some quality. They don't want to mess around with the system. Running only free software really does not concern them and never will. It would be good if Stallman and other FOSS fanatics understood that and stop acting like jerks, because that will only have negative effect on their image.
Seriously, what was he thinking? Now people will think of Linux geeks as those lunatics who are happy to see people die.
Look, I know no one likes to speak ill of the dead and all, but geez, last week's lovefest got WAY WAY WAY out of hand. Jobs was an important figure, no doubt, but the over-the-top platitudes were often more humorous and bizarre than heartfelt or touching. There were "expert" commentators on CNN calling Jobs the "most important person in the history of technology" with straight faces. People who didn't even KNOW the guy were crying like their daddy had just died. At one point I think I saw Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper make a teary-eyed pledge to throw themselves on his funeral pyre.
I doubt Jesus' apostles were as upset after the crucifixion as some of the supposedly objective "experts" and "journalists" I saw last week. It's not like I expected them to get into the more negative and tawdry aspects of his past with his body still warm, but I didn't expect such unabashed hero-worship and hagiography either. It was just shameful.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yes, RMS has done some great things.
But he needs to GET THE FUCK OVER HIMSELF.
His is not the only viable vision.
MOST PEOPLE JUST WANT THEIR TOY TO FUCKING WORK AND DON'T CARE.
Sorry about the shouting, but it's well-deserved IMO.
Wow, forming impressions on someones intellect based on his looks and posture.
Slashdot = stagnated.
Stallman wants exactly one thing: visbility for FOSS. He doesn't care about anything else. So if he has to make some pseudo-controversial statement about a generally well-liked public figure in order to get some air time, he will. Personally, I elect to pay him little attention.
My other sig is clever.
my account of Stallman's appearance at the Yorktown HS computer club.
Jobs and his company are based entirely on control of other people's property. You can't put the OS on your own hardware, you can't run your own apps on the iPod Touch / iPhone without hacking it, you can't use products which directly compete with Apple's offering on either either (heh). Are you all forgetting iTunes prior to the catalogue being converted to DRM-free MP3s?
Horrible people can do good things just as good people can do horrible things, and a lot of the things Jobs did in computing were horrible. Pretty, and king of usability, but all a thing veneer on something fundamentally malign.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
he does.
Stallman combines the rhetorical nuance of an asteroid impact with the diplomactic tact of a woodchipper.
Not only is there wisdom in knowing precisely what to say, there is also wisdom in knowing when not to say it.
Fair enough. For over 30 years Stallman has fought for our freedom to choose and modify the software we use in our machines, while Jobs has fought against it.
You don't have to have liked him, but you could have at least shown some respect rather than making the GNU (And by association, Linux, even though we hate you) community look like tools, instead of just yourself as you usually do.
Jobs may have helped bring about some significant technologies. But Apple, and Jobs, come no where near what the fanboys think. And in many respects, Jobs was just another scam artist.
http://techrights.org/2011/10/07/steve-jobs/
that makes me glad that I do not have a television. It is easy to ignore the stupid on the internet. There is plenty of stupid on the internet, but it is easy to ignore it.
The link given on /. and latimes leads to a bullet point list of posts. The anchor jumps you to Stallman's Oct 6 bullet point, but I can't find the a link to the full article?!
http://stallman.org/archives/2011-jul-oct.html#06_October_2011_(Steve_Jobs)
What did I miss?
... but I agree with stallman. Jobs figured out that you can make aesthetically pleasing stuff and make a lot of profit off simplifying hardware design for everyday people BUT this has a negative effect on those who actually use computers and computing devices as something beyond a toaster or glorified television. Jobs just turned computing devices into consumer items. The downside is that his companies success with walled gardens is giving a lot of other companies and developers the same idea of creating walled gardens where you never own anything, can't modify it, etc. A kind of kind of feudalistic computing.
I've watched gaming go downhill over the last 10 years with the rise shit like world of warcraft showing everyone the path to walled garden land because there are enough stupid people who don't give a shit about gaming that will just take it up the ass because they aren't passionate about games. So we get things like Starcraft 2 chained to online, no LAN, we get permanent online DRM being pushed and crap like onlive. At this point I really want to burn down the software industry. I remember a time when blizzard wasn't as evil as it is today and you actually were treated like a customer rather then a magpie with a wallet.
In the same way, people who work in computing, and do computing and are passionate about computing need freedom from corporate tyranny to innovate. Each generation of tinkering kids becomes the next set of developers/entrepreneurs/innovators. To lock everything behind a walled garden just creates a big mess and ensures solutions are suffocated or co-opted for someones personal greed with a net negative for humanity as a whole.
All great innovations are built upon mountains of others that came before them, locking them down is just a surefire way to suffocate progress.
Flamebait? If my comment is flamebait, then this whole story is flamebait, and it should never have reached the main page. Moderation by Apple shill, or Big Media shill? You decide.
Either way, I can afford the karma.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It got a bit pathetic with people running around talking about how Steve Jobs invented the mouse, the personal computer, the smartphone, the media player, the tablet, and practically sliced bread. The guy was an excellent product designer with a good eye for where the market was going to go next. He was no more instrumental in shaping 21st century society than any other fashion designer. And yay, he was yet another ruthless capitalist, yawn!
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I was repulsed by the sickening display of sycophancy and arse-licking hagiography that spewed out of every orifice of the media last week and was glad to see someone redress the balance.
I'm not Jobs' defender, but it seems to me that, as a society, we seem to want our heroes to be perfect (or at least to conform to our ideas of "right"-ness), and a lot of contention about legacy revolves around discussion of whether these folks "deserve" to be lauded. There was a book last year that implied that Ghandi was a homosexual. Which, of course, caused a real outcry in India, but to my point: who cares? Mr. Jobs had a child that he allegedly denied for many years; as a family man, that offends me much more than his complicity in the Foxconn suicides. Now there I am, projecting my values on him; but as far as I can tell, he wasn't required to follow my guidelines for living. Can we agree that those of us who use computers or portable music players or smartphones, or those of us who take our kids to see CG movies have been influenced by his work? I personally think I would have hated working for him, but I used products from his company every day.
Steve Jobs, inventor of the color white and creator of minimalist design died last week. Steve was reported to have conceived, designed and personally build every piece of hardware produced by Apple. Good night sweet prince.
I suppose Stallman's just being a dick (or an attention whore). Used to be we at least pretended to be respectful of the dead for a little while.... but not any more, not when there's column-inches to appropriate.
bah.
Frankly, I'm no slave to an operating system. I switch OSes with abandon. In fact, as much as I think that Stallman is a zealot, he deserves more credit than Jobs or Gates in enabling me to switch OSes with abandon.
Stallman is right regarding Jobs & operating systems, especially the iOS.
In all of the news about Jobs' life, what surprised me is that most of his wealth is from Pixar / Disney. Although Disney is far and away no friend of Stallman's (and it's surprising RMS didn't mention *that*), Pixar has inspired many with the potential for what computers could do. George Lucas, ILM, and others have skimmed the surface, but Pixar made real CGI magic. Liberating Pixar from Lucas was a real coup.
The pantheon of computer leaders is big enough to include RMS, Gates, Jobs, and many others, each with their contributions and deficits. Jobs had many deficits, certainly - but there are few who are notable in this world who can be solely deficient without any accomplishments, just as there are few of accomplishment who lack any deficits.
Back to work on my two non-Apple OSes...
I like the style of RMS, the world needs it.
Jobs was a sucessful inventor, but Apple builds very closed systems. (even if they use some BSD code) This is bad for users.
aaaaaaa
Absolute agree with Mr. Stallman.
While I respect Richard Stallman's perspective, I respectfully disagree.
Steve Jobs, through Apple's rigorous control and single-minded development of its own "walled garden" ecosystem of software and hardware, has demonstrated that a company with a will and a vision can provide a valuable, innovative solution that is affordable, functional, desirable, and that still protects its progenitor's interests in profiting from their own labor. I see nothing inherently evil in that.
I do not agree that all software should be free. I believe that we should have the *option* of making it free, and protecting that freedom, and that, I believe, is where Mr. Stallman has made his greatest contribution - the GPL. Through the original GNU Manifesto, the tireless efforts of the EFF and Mr. Stallman's leadership in preserving that vision, a vibrant, thriving community of open source and always-free solutions exist. But the software is free, and remains free, by the will and choice of its maker.
To me, this does not invalidate the other option - that one can choose to protect and license technology solutions, deriving the same protections of copyright that the GPL provides to open source software. Mr. Jobs proved, beyond any reasonable expectation, that a corporate steward can do a very, very good job of creating and maintaining desirable technology solutions. Others do as well. Both models of thought deserve a place in the market.
RIP, Steve. Keep on fighting, Richard. You both to us all great justice.
LEB
for ReadWriteWeb to find a new editor, one that doesn't pander to fanboys
Steve Jobs was also in part responsible for a lot of bad, remember the Foxconn worker 'suicide'? Or how about suing journalists? Or hiring security that pretended to be police? Or requiring employees submit to searches or be fired?
some mentally ill slashdotter (arent most of them?) is going to put out a hit on this guy.
I actually saw someone refer to him as the da vinci of our generation! jobs had a hitler-esque way of giving people a shit sandwich and convincing them to finish it off and lick their fingers.
Tact is unfortunately overrated.
Stallman is an asshole.
With that out of the way, he speaks true. I abandoned everything Apple for exactly the reasons he pointed out and I hope, as Stallman does, that Apple will become less anally retentive in the future.
Stallman is that guy who takes his job way to seriously. He loses touch with reality, he loses friends, his only friends are those with the same goals, but he even dismisses them for not being as committed as he is. In the end Stallman does the real work needed by the FOSS movement, he benefits the movement greatly, however he's like the overnight shift in a 24 hour production facility. Often the very best workers are on the overnight shift, not because you don't want the secrets to their efficiency accidentally leaked to someone passing through, but because the most talented people are often such eccentric weirdo's you only want the results of their work seen, not the workers themselves.
That last article condemning Stallman was just completely out of tune with the man himself. He wasn't hateful towards Job's himself, Stallman has a goal in mind and he wont rest until it's accomplished. He will never accomplish it. His goal of all software being 100% open source, patent free, and free in every way will never happen, and it's one of the places I differ with him. I support someones right to make money off of software, I do agree FOSS is the way to go and I do think even closed source software should eventually become open, but I do support someone closing source for a time to make a profit, and this is where I disagree with Stallman, who I see as an Old Testament Prophet of the Open Code.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Just because Jobs was innovative, popular and successful doesn't mean he was a saint. Considering his closed hardware platforms, Jobs showed us that his views were perhaps even more the antithesis of the FOSS movement than those of Mr. Bill.
Stallman wants people to provide software in the way he and his flock want it provided. How people use it is irrelevant. His point is that in an open ecosystem, people can choose to use software however they like, whether it's by connecting to monolithic vertically integrated software stacks or by striking out on their own. Apple didn't provide the choice; if you wanted Apple UI, you had to buy into Apple's whole product line, because you had no other options, particularly on their mobile devices.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Agreed! With the last part of your posting, that is: emacs, hands down. :)
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
But if that happens because of this particular outspokenness, that might be yet another correct course of action taken for completely the wrong reason.
> His statement has spurred reaction from the community; some even asking to the Free Software movement to find a new voice.
I agree with them. Furthermore, I propose that anyone making fun of Steve Jobs in a cartoon should be stoned with bricked iPhones. Don't let the Infidels smear the name of The Prophet. Inch' Apple.
lucm, indeed.
Stallman really should have a bit more couth than that. In particular, this close to his death.
What is it about FOSS that inspires such blind arrogance that they shoot themselves in the foot? Stallman is hurting his cause, just as a Mozilla employee recently hurt their cause -- by feeling and expressing contempt for those who don't share their vision, and by lacking respect, decency, maturity, and basic business sense.
Unfortunately it raises doubts about the competency of some FOSS organizations. If they don't have the understanding to respect other points of view, or the sense to do simple things in their own self-interest, who can rely on them?
I strongly support FOSS. It depresses me that so many leaders needlessly damage the cause.
If RMS had his way, we'd all be using command lines with obscure syntax. And we'd still be waiting for HURD.
The FSF has co-opted the idea that software should be free (free as in unencumbered), but that idea was around before the FSF. Just look at the Bill Gates piracy letter way back when - he wrote that in response to the rampant piracy of the era.
The thing that the FSF gave the world was a compiler and toolchain that had decent performance, was free (as in you didn't have to license it), and was retargetable. They also created a legal framework that formalized the idea of unencumbered software - which probably is going to be their most important contribution to the software world.
What I personally remember about RMS/the FSF back in the day (vis-a-vis Apple) is that they were pissed that Apple refused to kiss their collective asses and give them free stuff/donations/technical support. I also specifically remember the FSF bad-mouthing and dropping their non-existent 'support' Apple during the Apple/MS copyright suit, while supporting Intel/x86 even though Intel was suing AMD for copyright of the x86 instruction set.
The FSF: you can't love them, you can't shoot them.
Stallman helped the free software movement and a lot, and 30 years ago, was perhaps one of the best people who could be at the forefront of it all. Today, with everyone using computers in some form, everything software-related receives publicity and attention. This is why Stallman, in the 21st century, is one of the worst possible mouthpieces for the free software movement.
Most things he says reinforce the strange nerd stereotype. RMS doesn't care, of course. But his speeches and articles are somewhat "out there", he tends to ignore social norms and customs. And to the world's non-nerd population, it just gives the impression that free software is for socially inept bearded types.
Stallman's ideal vision of a world where every user is a programmer that reprograms their devices at will isn't happening for too many reasons to list. And in today's reality, for free software to advance, the movement could really do with another mouthpiece. Someone who can speak to the masses in a way that suits them, showing how free software is superior for practical reasons (not ideological ones), and someone who can break the perception that only big multibillion companies produce software that are fit for the average person to use.
That's absurd. I'm not saying that Stallman is right on everything, in fact I think he can be kind of a nut most of the time, but this criticism has absolutely no basis in anything that has actually been said by Stallman. Richard Stallman wants us to be able to do what we want to do on our own machines. He wants freedom, unrestricted use. AUTHENTIC freedom, not that "freedom from apps that trash your phone" nonsense. All the while Steve Jobs was constantly looking for new ways to restrict the user. How on earth do you go from that to "Stallman wants us to do it his way, Jobs wants us to do it his way, they're just two different sides of the same coin"? My gosh, on your reasoning, every single revolution, every single political change is completely trivial.
it helps expressing yourself better
aaaaaaa
Ironic that most people doing meaningful work in free software will be glad when RS is gone. Stallman is one of the most negative forces on computing in general and free software in particular.
LA Times says "some critics" but really only link to one guy, former Slashdot editor, Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier. Another one of Stallman's critics who doesn't have the balls to actually state what really bothers him about Stallman, but sleazily uses any fake controversy as an excuse to launch a discrediting smear against RMS. If you really want to know why RMS gets attacked by some of these so-called FOSS advocates, just examine RMS's other political postings on his website. It'll become apparent.
that Stallman is correct, living in freedom requires that we use free software. On the other hand, this is being written on a Mac iBook.
"I'm pissed off I was not as successful or appreciated"
That's the deal in a nutshell. Jobs gave the world what it wanted. RMS did not. End of story.
I'm not sure we'd be where we are now in Stallman's world. Say what you will about Jobs and Gates, they DID bring general purpose computing to the masses and it DID change the world. Maybe someone would have risen up had they not been here, but they'd have been just as bad. And if no one had, we'd all be using text-mode EMACS on a HURD kernel. Well except this would be a netnews forum and there'd be a lot fewer people on it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Not one bit different, down to the careless, unempathic, arrogant perspective he has of the rest of the world and those who don't share his belief. JUST like an Apple Zealot.
FTFY
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I would agree with most of the people who are upset with RMS over this if it weren't for the way in which the media overreacted to Jobs' passing. I know it's typical to focus on the positive aspects of a person's life after they die, but the media rose Steve Jobs to the level of a god. They focused on his revival of Apple while ignoring the fact that he had a big part in its original downward spiral. They exalted Jobs' focus on good design principles while ignoring the fact that he created a corporate culture of trying to sue all of the competition out of the market. They trumpeted the success of the iPhone and iPad while ignoring the walled gardens they created. It's not my place to say whether or not Jobs' presence in the market was a net positive or negative, but I think it's fair for the media to cover both sides of a person's life as long as it is done with tact.
Richard Stallman is unfortunate. Being correct but not politically correct is a tough equation.
Not that I want to agree with what is basically a trolling comment, but he didn't actually say anything about RMS's intellect, just his personal hygiene. Which, let's be honest, isn't too far from the truth - http://youtu.be/I25UeVXrEHQ?t=1m46s
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
What's Jobs guilty of? Making products that people want to buy, at prices they want to pay. Leading a company (or really a bunch of companies) that did some outstanding engineering that led to some incredible products that people really want to buy at prices that were on the high side, but people still willingly paid them. You (and the free software movement in general), with the help of the Unholy St. IGNUcius, of the Church of Emacs, are welcome to try to produce a product that people like better. However, if Emacs is any indication, I think you have a ways to go.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Yeah, not so much.
Computers need to be an appliance like a refrigerator or a car. Turn it on, do some work, turn it off, do something with the rest of your life.
If I want to do something at a lower level I'll use the development tools. Much like modifying a car, there are tools (welding machine, air tools, etc. versus XCode or whatever) to do whatever you want with your device.
I used to care about stuff like this about 10 years ago. Now I don't. I have better things to do with my time. When I sit down at a computer I want to get the task at hand done as quickly as possible with good results without having to re-invent the wheel all the time. Can't be bothered.
- signed, 25 year UNIX Administrator.
http://youtu.be/I25UeVXrEHQ?t=1m46s
I love the idea of free software, I love open-source, but my god, this man is too much.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Emacs comes out on top for me because it is a work tool and not a toy.
When I want toys there are computer games, which are way more fun.
I made a joke on Facebook when Steve Jobs died. Something about how God was mad at him because iPhone 4S was just a minor upgrade to iPhone 4, rather than the long-awaited iPhone 5, etc etc. Some of the flames I got were seriously crazy; one girl compared Steve Jobs dying to *her two miscarriages*. I couldn't believe it.
I'm sorry Steve Jobs is dead. Really. He was a human being, and he had hopes, dreams, feelings and ambitions just like the rest of us.
But to put Steve Jobs in the same league as people like Alan Turing, or Ada Lovelace, or Charles Babbage seems... very wrong. He was imperfect in life, like all of us, and remains imperfect in death. He was just a man. 150,000 other people I hadn't met died that day too, but nobody gave a shit about them. 150,000 people I've never met died today too. If I broke down crying and sobbing for each and every one of them, I'd be a wreck.
We as a society idolize the dead. I don't believe in extolling the virtues of the recently deceased. Given a long enough time the life expectancy of all Humans drops to 0; we all die some time, and when my time comes I would much, much rather people tell the truth about me and maybe even have a bit of a laugh, even at my expense. It's not like I'm going to care, I'll be dead.
I find it completely disrespectful that people think the best way to remember and "respect" someone who's recently died is to gloss over their flaws and essentially tell lies about how grand they were.
When I die I just want people to remember the truth about me, whatever that was, not some kind of warped 1984-ish false memory of a person who never was.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
he was a greedy businessman that ran a multi-national corporation...
Apple contracts to build a laptop in the far east for $100 using slave labor, and manipulated currencies
Then Apple Caymans, who owes no taxes of any kind, is a corp controlled by Apple USA. Apple Caymans then buys the laptop for $100 from the far east and sells it to Apple USA for $1000. The $900 profit is all profit, they pay no taxes on it.
Apple USA retails the laptop for $1100 for a $100 profit that they pay some US corporate income tax on.
So as you see, of the true $1000 profit on the laptop, they are only paying US taxes on $100 of it.
This applies to everything imported, drills, tools, electronics, everything.
This is just another reason why US based manufacturers are screwed by the world market. They have to pay full US taxes on their full profits, the other businesses don't.
it is the globalst/multi-national businesses like this that makes exorbitant profits while the USA hemorrhages jobs to third-world state owned sweatshops, they have no loyalty to anyone except making as much money as possible at the expense of everything else, even their own countrymen, fuck globalism, i hope it crashes, i would gladly do without all that "made in china" dreck to see a level playing field in the economy again
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
... is wholly good or wholly evil. Can we leave it at that?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
At least we know when Stallman finally kicks off he'll have an open casket.
How much of this is about what he said and how much of this is just antipathy for Richard Stallman's status as an ideologue and Ayatollah of Free Software?
For the record, I think he has something of a point about Jobs, at least relative to the ideology of free software. Jobs was about control, and the iPhone/iPad are really tightly controlled platforms with highly regulated applications and a single-source application marketplace.
That being said, I like to think I agree with Stallman in many ways, yet I own an iPhone and an iPad and really haven't felt constrained in any of the ways I should be constrained. I can only think off the top of my head of one app I wish Apple would allow (a Wifi scanning utility) and one other thing that makes me crazy, the arbitrary and unchangeable list of alert sounds.
My overall sense is that people look at these devices for what they do for them and don't consider, don't care or don't understand the philosophical concepts that go into them.
I also think that some of Stallman's Free Software concepts while philosophically sound are becoming somewhat practically irrelevant in a modern world with so many computerized devices. Even assuming I have the technical skill as a programmer, I have neither time nor inclination to access, modify or even wrap my head around all the software I interact with and more than I have the time or inclination to wrap my head around the chemistry or engineering of all the man-made items in my life.
I think Stallman's free software philosophies seem more relevant to a smaller computing universe of the 1970s and 1980s when software was less complicated and the idea that you had the time and ability to actually modify it.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/apple-scratch-app/
Not one bit different, down to the careless, unempathic, arrogant perspective he has of the rest of the world and those who don't share his belief. JUST like a fundamentalist nutcase.
Not quite.
A true fundamentalist would damn his followers to eternal hell torture, blame their parents for not raising them properly, promote social shunning of his followers, claim some old book proves the fundamentalist correct, swear the nations founders were all fundamentalists despite all evidence to the contrary, accuse the followers of a vast conspiracy to discredit the reputation of the fundamentalists, and have a problem solving strategy focused solely on prayer for deliverance.
Not just, in summary, say its too bad the guy died before he his opinions could have been corrected.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Oh yeah, and by the way... this shows once again that RMS has no class. This is like Fred Phelps and the scum from Westboro Baptist Church who are protesting at Jobs' funeral -- RMS is mostly just doing this for publicity. Someone's death is not an occasion for advancing ideology. The classy thing to do would be to find things that Jobs did that you approved of and save the ideological rant for another day!
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Wow - equating odour with intellect.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
For all of you logic-challenged commenters out there: saying bad things about RMS does not turn Jobs into a saint, no matter how much you wish it would.
The GPLv3 takes issue with the statement "How people use it is irrelevant."
RMS has never been one to hold back his opinion and he is just saying what a lot of us have felt for a long time.
I am extremely sad that Jobs died. I would never have wished this on him.
OTOH, I am happy that his personal influence on Apple is done. Perhaps Apple will loosen up a bit on some of its product policies.
I'm all for OSS. I ran Linux for about a decade as my desktop. I still use OSS on my Mac and Solaris today, but as far as desktops go - I went Mac OS X. I just got tired of the GUI inconsistencies, recompiling kernels, fixing one thing only to have another break, etc. Mac OS X might be a semi-walled garden, but at least I can plug in what I need to get my work done, and have it work out of the box. The interface is a true joy to boot.
What has all this "freedom" gotten us that Stallman espouses? 500 different distros, all slightly different. Still no real GUI consistency. Maintenance of a Linux system is still a very hands-on affair. And forget trying to compile something; first you have to install every dependency, then hope the "make all" actually completes without errors. It really gets interesting trying to compile something on another palatform (e.g. Solaris).
I don't want to sound like a Mac fanboi, but c'mon. Drag an app to your desktop and it's installed. Drag it to the trash and it's not. Software updates are generally just as easy. Just because I go through all these machinations on a server, doesn't mean I want to do this on my desktop too. I have work to do.
As for Stallman; is he even still relevant? He thinks he speaks for OSS, and that may arguably be the case. But he doesn't speak for me. Steve Jobs might have been arrogant or mercurial at times, but what he's created as far as the user experience and end-to-end computing across all my devices? Better than I ever got out of Linux, that's for shit-sure.
Well, I know some of the answer. That there is something along the lines of device freedom, though we don't ask that of the microprocessors in the microwave. (Though some clever folks have put the os of their choice on appliances.) This is an elite freedom, in that most of the world could not make use of the freedom if it was available. The ironic thing: people are putting their own code onto their iPhones and iPads, so I guess this is about Apple having to support customizations. That doesn't make sense to me.
The FSF and Apple had a kerfuffle over Objective-C and gcc over a decade ago. The FSF won and Apple became a well-behaved licensee, meeting the terms of the license. Apple didn't start talking about Communism and if they needed functionality under a different license, they got the code or wrote it. Exactly what we tell those folks who pop up now and then and try to exploit work that is available through the GPL.
Should the FSF distance itself from Stallman because of this tasteless compulsion to express a polemic with the thinnest veneer of humanism? No. Why start now?
..by always saying warm and cuddly things. I find myself agreeing with Stallman. Job's products were marketed towards those who liked to fantasize about how close to Star Trek TNG their lives were. All the while they were designed to restrict software, media and content choices. What he did wouldn't be much different than Comcast throttling all sites but their preferred sites to their customers and marketing themselves as the great library of the world, yet everyone hates the idea of corporations so much as tainting net neutrality. If the consumer technology industry needs the likes of Steve Jobs to advance, then it's just a matter of time before the world looks like one of my favorite childhood sci-fi novels.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
"Stallman who?"
Stallman who made Linux possible. No I won't call it FNU/Linux or whatever.
Stallman who made Steve Jobs mac OS possible... Without the GPL license, and applied in a dual license, a lot of the MacOS show-offs wouldn't have been there... Have you ever hurd of Safari, just to mention one.
Still, Stallman has made is an enormous impact on planet Earth, quite possibly much larger than that of Jobs. Stallman is just the unhurd of version of Jobs, and w/o turtle-neck. The GPL (which has Linux as a subset) made it for a hurd of other free software licenses as well.
Stallman's contributions stand on their own, whether or not correct and/or not politically correct.
All due respect to the deceased, and his family. But that company is/was horrible from an ethical standpoint. They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but they put a lot of people out of business for trivial copycatting. From the cookie shop in NY ( if I recall) being sued for making iPhone cookies, to the carpenter sued for making decorative wooden iPhone plaques. I don't know if any of those cases made it to court, but that's not the point. They sued the living hell out of anybody that even looked at them wrong without permission. Not to mention the ongoing suits against the rest of the technology world, so many lawsuits open right now I cant even recall. Jobs was a huge proponent of defending his copyrights, but he very often took it WAY to far. For example, attempting to enforce patents on touch screen gestures? Really? I actually like a lot of Apple hardware, they certainly have their place in the industry, but they will never be more than a niche marketing firm until they pull their heads out of their asses. RIP jobs, despite all his failings as a ethical human being he was a brilliant marketeer and business man. I give respect where respect is due but otherwise; while am certainly not happy that he is dead, I AM glad that there is now somebody else at the Apples helm. Hopefully Mr Cook, has a bit more common sense with the company going forward.
What I have always found interesting is how people react when someone has a different option of someone / something. My experience is many people , no I won't give a percentage because I am being a generalist about this, reacted as if they were just insulted by any disagreement no matter how simple it may be. Shockly enough it's even worse on the internet. If I disagree with anyone I get to do that since I am unique. Not everyone has to agree with everything and if someone disagrees with you that is just fine. Now let's all put our big boy and girl panties on and use what little God given common sense exists among us to understand there are things in the world that are just wrong. But since people go rabid foaming at the mouth mad when someone says "I really don't get two rat farts about Steve Jobs, don't get me wrong it is a sad time for the family and I send my honest condolences and respect their privcy in this personal matter, but I really don't give a frack about his life or the products he touted."
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.
Jobs returned to Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little interest in or knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. According to Wozniak, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000) and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.
^ Letters – General Questions Answered, Woz.org
Wozniak, Steven: "iWoz", a: pages 147–148, b: page 180. W. W. Norton, 2006. ISBN 978-0-393-06143-7
Kent, Stevn: "The Ultimate History of Video Games", pages 71–73. Three Rivers, 2001. ISBN 0-7615-3643-4
"Breakout". Arcade History. June 25, 2002. Retrieved April 19, 2010.
"Classic Gaming: A Complete History of Breakout". Classicgaming.gamespy.com. Retrieved April 19, 2010.
Check it out on Wikipedia. Steve Jobs was an asshole, end of story--and his model was remove choice from consumers. It's brilliant because if you can't do things you're not supposed to do, shit probably won't break. The real trouble is, it also means you get people like the MPAA telling you what you are allowed to do--or whoever else is in bed with Apple.
but I mostly agree with him on this.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Compare emacs with the shiny toys Jobs made and I think we see who comes out on top.
Way to cherry-pick facts to back up your bias. Compare GCC with the Lisa and see who comes out on top.
But now that I re-read your post, perhaps you were being ironic. Emacs was plainly more innovative than any of Apple's "shiny toys". Less popular, of course, but why would we nerds care about that?
Let me clarify. Even though I disagree with Stallman over the necessity of all things being user accessible, I appreciate the point and believe that his is an important voice to hear. It's just there's a time and place for everything and clumsy formulations such as Jobs as Mayor Daley or "malign influence on computing" are counter-productive as he tries to build the world he wants. That's his problem and I don't believe the FSF has to respond to what he says as an individual.
What Stallman needs is perspective. He lives in a world of absolutes. "They are the devils, we are the holy warriors!" logic does not apply to anything and everything, including software. There are no rights or wrongs in the way Apple, Microsoft and GNU do business/provide their services/software. They are just different in their approach. GNU, and Stallmans philosophy, could not have sold the number of machines Apple has been able to sell in the last decade, just because of the fact that a normal person in the street does not care if iPhone was scam to surround them in a walled garden. A normal person in the street wants stuff to work, and look pretty, which the iPhone did. Apple is successful because Jobs related to the general public, providing them with what they thought was cool. Nothing wrong in that. General public doesn't give a damn about deeper philosophy, about openness, and about walled gardens until they get a raid from RIAA for piracy or they get sued. In this world, you make a living not by uplifting people, but by selling people what they want and need.
Stallman's worst defect (other than his nonconformist appearance and manner -- which are both fine by me, but not great qualities in a spokesman) is his faith in the general intelligence of the world at large.
He leaves things unsaid, because he assumes that the audience is paying proper attention, and reading between the lines.
Case in point:
Stallman's ideal vision of a world where every user is a programmer that reprograms their devices at will isn't happening for too many reasons to list
You don't need to be a programmer to program a computer. My boss isn't a programmer, yet he can program a computer simply by paying me money and telling me what to do. My mum isn't a programmer, but she can program a computer by asking me a favour. Stallman assumes people realise that.
Stallman is the anti-Jobs in many ways. But they"re both brilliant, driven, uncompromising geniuses. And to say that Stallman hasn't had as much impact on the world as Jobs is wrong on it's face, in my opinion. I reckon more devices have Linux installed than any Apple OS. How many startups would have been crushed by server OS costs without GNU/Linux as an option, even just by driving down the price of competitors? How many pieces of software that started as hobby hacking wouldn't exist with a free C compiler? App store? Linux had this years before the iPhone? Safari's engine started in KDE. Mac interface descended from X. Super-computing, internet plumbing, all dominated by Linux and GNU for a reason. Then there's Android.
If you don't like him, Stallman gives you plenty of ammunition. The same could be said about Jobs (personal emails to disgruntled users?) He spoke his mind, and a lot of people may not like what he said. In his mind, the world of software is a secret war for the freedom of billions of people. He believes proprietary software is a precursor to real live Soviet style oppression. He thinks Jobs is/was creating the world that appeared in the iconic 1984 Mac commercial. And if he believes that, blunting his words would be a disservice to history and posterity.
Steve Jobs was one to the most powerful on the planet. He's gonna have enemies. He knew that and didn't much care. I doubt his family is surfing Stallman's website looking for an epitaph.
As for the spokesman thing, I don't see RMS as that. He's the visionary. He's supposed to be unbending, uncompromising, theory based. He's not supposed to sugercoat. He's a coder, not a CEO.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Had one guy on a graphic design mailing list claim, ``Without Steve Jobs there wouldn't have have programs like InDesign.'' --- displaying an apparently willful ignorance of the existence of page layout programs on the Xerox Alto, back from the days when Apple was still making the Apple ][, and another guy claim Steve Jobs ``never designed anything'' (counter-example would be the Apple Macintosh Calculator Desktop Accessory: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Calculator_Construction_Set.txt ).
He was an early pioneer (among many other pioneers) who worked as leadership to a lot of teams which did some amazing work (Apple ][, Macintosh, NeXT, iMacs, iPod, Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad), and had some bad moments (Apple III, Apple Macintosh Portable, closing down the Newton). It's sad that he has passed away, and while it's appropriate to remember the good things which he has achieved (getting California to directly ask about organ donor status at the DMV was huge), and the good aspects of his character, he was a man like other men, and it's important not to lose sight of that.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I had one encounter with Mr. Jobs, and I'll never forget how gratuitously rude he was to me. Maybe he was having a bad day and his real personality was very different, but I never bought any Apple products after that, and when he died I didn't bother to read the obit.
I'm not arguing for or against Apple, but I do see your point. I do still believe Stallman's emotions got involved, and his anger, as usual got the better of Stallman. Choice or not, Stallman still wants all of his followers to use FOSS strictly, and only FOSS. Nothing else. It comes out heavily in his thoughts on this man's death. This sort of purism is borderline "software racism" in my mind and leads to a sort of negativity that is unwarranted and out of line. Jobs didn't care if people bought or did not buy his software and hardware. Jobs did place rules on using his goods; tons of them. Stallman will hate you until the universe folds in on itself if you even touch proprietary software. To me it is the same difference. Two views, and use the users trapped in the middle.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
That's disgusting.
I didn't wait for you to speak up, but the way you did, is very good.
cb
First of all, I do not agree or disagree with Mr. Stallman. However, as a "Spokesman for FOSS" this is definately not what I would expect.
We here generally use some other flavor of Operating System that is a given. And that other flavor does not at all meet with what the public wants. WE want our freedom with our computers. But WE are not every computer user out there. I am not being an elitist here but the fact is that most people want to go to their local computer outlet store, purchase a big black box or laptop and plug it in to surf the web and play Angry Birds. We choose to be different.
But we must also respect those that want to have their computers spoon fed to them else our freedom will mean nothing in the end. Yes Linux installations on both servers and desktops have gone up in the past decade. However, so has the installed base of Windows and OS X. What Steve Jobs did was provide a medium for the average user to have and enjoy a computing experience. He did it well and with many innovations that others failed at (why is the iPhone so big but Blackberry loosing market for example).
Mr. Stallman may be a huge advocate of FOSS and for that I thank him deeply and sincerely. And when our "Spokesman for FOSS" compares Steve Jobs who did what his customers wanted him to do, to a corrupt mayor, it does nothing but shine US, the FOSS users in a negative light. I personally would much rather be associated with the positive side of FOSS than the negative.
I saw a report like that too, and was about to get angry until they showed the patent for that idiotic round mouse (ie: directionless pointing device) that came out with the iMac G3's about 11~12 years ago. Some cub reporter comes across a Steve Jobs patent for a mouse, and assumes he invented the entire industry. Never mind that it was the single biggest FAIL in the history of pointing devices.
I (mostly) like Apple products, and am thankful for Jobs's contribution to the industry. But I also empathize with RMS's point of view.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Stallman is a blowhard and it is time that the FSF gets somebody else to speak for the whole movement. Jobs at his heart was always a capitalist and he did everything he could to protect his empire whether that be Apple, Next or Pixar. That's contrary to a lot of what the FSF stands for and I realize that Stallman may have a problem with that but you can't deny that he helped to mold the personal computing landscape and came up with lots of innovative ways of locking people into his products. Jobs took his lessons from the truly great monopoly builders of the past: Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie who did all they could trample competition in the marketplace and build their empires. The empire that Jobs helped create did make cars, or sell oil but it is in nearly every home in the US and people line up to buy it at stores with the anticipation of a bunch of teenagers at a Taylor Swift concert.
Stallman has always hated capitalism and although the FSF is a good movement but his mantra is getting a bit long in the tooth, much like his hair. The concept of Free, Open software can co-exist right along side capitalism and those *true* innovations shouldn't be disdained because they aren't free nor should innovators be considered pariahs because not everything they do is Free either.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
A DJ on sirus-xm said he was the "Thomas Edison of our generation" wtf are these folks smoking?
Sometimes it is hard to see future harm past present benefits. but, to reiterate :
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2462124&cid=37619552
walled gardens and cash cowing users is now de facto reality of mobile platforms. moreover, major players are wanting to take this situation out of mobile platforms, and into existing pc-internet platform as well.
In fact, stallman is right - despite he gave some things to computing, steve rather single handedly undid all the gains that were made for user freedom since early 1980s -> and much of that fight was fought by likes of stallman against hostile industries. if anyone has the right to complain about jobs, its stallman.
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Do you know who makes that profit? Shareholders. Jobs paid himself $1 a year. Apple is widely-held stock, and its owners include pension funds and individual stockholders like myself. Where else do you think individual wealth comes from, pots of gold that people take from leprechauns? It is amazing to me how many people do not understand who really owns and benefits from corporate profits and growth. The purpose of a corporation is to make shareholders like me money, not to be a jobs program. I'm a small investor - and one of those "countrymen" you refer to - and I've held Apple for almost 20 years and it's made me financially secure.
I don't understand people who bitch about their jobs and being "wage slaves," then hate on those who find a way to make money outside of a paycheck, like investing in successful companies like Apple.
And of course Apple outsources it's labor. If it manufactured iPhones in California they'd cost $2500.
That round mouse, used correctly was far better for the hand than the traditional oval ones. Rest your hand on the surface below and move your fingers...not your whole hand.
I threw it out as well! But still, I know a few ergonomic people that think it was one of the best things out (then again, they also love trackballs, and I hate those things as well).
The time for respect was a long time ago, and we showed plenty enough of it back then.
People who want personal computers to not just be video game consoles, were complaining about Jobs' influence on the industry up until the last minute of his life. The reality of what's happening didn't magically stop the instant Jobs died, so why should people stop complaining about it? Lots of people die every day, and those who remain can't (and shouldn't) all just shut up about what's left behind, out of some desire to not offend a former adversary's shade. (And, BTW, look at what RMS really says. He doesn't talk shit about Jobs personally; he really does seem to limit the comment to Jobs' exit from the industry.)
The media went totally overboard with all the Jobs-love and they didn't just talk about his personal life; some praised his business, and I don't just mean Apple in general but even the IOS devices. That especially puts the topic on the table.
If Jobs' death means you shouldn't talk frankly about IOS' evil and the person who is likely most responsible for it, then Jobs' death means you also shouldn't misrepresent IOS evil and the person who is likely most responsible for it. So if anyone criticizes RMS' lack of "respect" here, I wonder where's their anger about how the rest of the media disrespected the living last week, with their you're-not-allowed-to-rebut-this deification.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There shouldnt be a moderation item like flamebait. In ANY charged subject, there WILL be flaming. that is a given. forcing views to be expressed as if they do not mean what they intend to mean by allowing a moderation item like flamebait, does nothing but to discourage opinion that others may fervently oppose, rightfully, or wrongfully.
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Looks like we could do with some memristors planted in our heads.
Jobs was the man who gave us reasonable, workable, and fair DRM when everyone else was tyring to shaft us with drm-wrapped wmv files that stopped working when the company you bought it from decided to up sticks and bugger off.
He was also the man who hated drm, and said so: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2007/02/steve_jobs_hate/
I'm a little scared about the long term implications of a walled garden approach too - but you can't have it both ways. His solution allowed iphones to have more freedom than an any other phone on release, remember, when iPhones came out carriers were still dictating what functions you could run on your phone. If Sprint didn't want you to have bluetooth, you couldn't have it - then the iPhone came along, and pretty much obliterated that bullshit - if you bought an iphone or not, it has changed your experience of mobile phones.
On top of that the walled garden means that I can download any app out of thousands without so much as considering the possibility of a trojan or virus - and if im feeling lucky, I can jailbreak and do whatever I want. If I don't like it, I can choose not to buy an iPhone. Will someone explain whats so bad about having this choice? Or are you pithy nerds simply scared that, gasp, the greater public might abandon the idea that all devices need to be completely hackable - security concerns be damned.
It seems extraordinary that people crying and whining about a walled garden are in fact trying to inflict their opinion regarding ideal software ecosystems on others, crowing from the rooftops about freedom as if they just HAVE to buy an iphone.
I'm not an apologist for apple - im not saying this is all going to be hunky dory down the road, it's just that I watched morons argue the Microsoft v Mac debate for 10 fucking years, and now we have to repeat this shit with apple on the other side? This whole idolising/evangelising of tech companies/philosophies shit was tired 10 years ago, and its tired now.
...is not that Stallman is wrong, or that he had an opinion about it, or that he expressed his opinion about it. It is that he offered his opinion, without being asked, while the corpse was still warm. It is just not nice to tell grieving people that they are stupid, even if maybe they are, a little, about one thing. Of course, he has the freedom to express his hurtful opinion. But what should be protected is only his right to say it. He is not protected from being called a dick.
Stallman has ZERO credibility with me. He mooches off whatever computer science neckbeards fall under his sway, he has bad personal habits which he has no issues sharing (my kid with Asperger's has more modesty than Stallman), and he's notable for... what, a fucking text editor? The guy is one step away from that crazy homeless person begging for cash on the street corner, and if it weren't for the abovementioned compsci idiots, that's exactly what he would be. Say what you want about Jobs - people came out in droves to Apple Stores to show their respect and admiration, tons of blogs and news sites wrote articles about his passing - meaning he had profound influence on consumer and pop culture, whatever its nature. Who the fuck is Stallman? A guy who eats his toejam in front of a class while a camera captures it all. Yeah... hobo.
I am a major supported of FSF's stated efforts and not the biggest apple supporter, so I should be more than accepting of such statements from Stallman... But of course I am not. It may be true that Steve jobs was a thorn to some of the efforts of the FSF, but dont bring that subject to light after his passing. Just smile and nod at those around you who praise his home computing and mobile device influences, and let swallow your ill-willed statements. To Stallman: when you are the head of a group like FSF, even though we all love your curmudgeon-i-ness, death is just one of them sacred things (I mean hell didnt like Kathy Griffin get shit for saying shit about Bin Laden or Hussein's death). Not sure if afraid of God or afraid of ghosts -Fry
And anyone who's stumbled across old DEC hardware knows that the round mouse long pre-dated the iMac.
Stallman has done many things to help the free software movement, and I appreciate those efforts. HOWEVER, the more I learn about the man and the more he talks, the more I wish he'd just shut up. He's sounding more and more like those church kooks who try to bait people (I don't wish to give them more press so am omitting their name).
And how is that different than Church of Apple?
Oh wait, it's different because RMS actually wants you to have freedom, while Church of Apple wants pretty much the opposite.
I know which one I would choose.
I remember a time when blizzard wasn't as evil as it is today and you actually were treated like a customer rather then a magpie with a wallet.
that was before vivendi bought it.
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i posted i cant use mod points.
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As usual, Mr. Stallman is right. Pay attention to the message, not the delivery.
Apple followed the law, not your open source religion, so they are horrible? People who disagree with you that all software and other intellectual property should be free are horrible? I think people who demand everyone else follow their dogma are horrible, how about that?
That's just sad. Good to know for Mr. Stallman that when he dies no one will be glad he's gone. But I wonder if anyone will notice.
He will never accomplish it. His goal of all software being 100% open source, patent free, and free in every way
i like the sound of that. one has to aim as high as s/he can, in order to achieve the best possible result. that means, we all should follow that example.
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...don't say anything at all.
I won't say I disagree with Stallman, but times of grieving are definitely one of those times where this rule applies.
enough. if you had been, you could see that the future holds 4 major companies in every aspect of computing from software to internet to distribution to gsm holding major control of everything, and deciding what you can and cannot do. it is what internet should NOT have been from the start, and which is fortunately what internet has not actually been. but jobs, in all his profit-making glory and user friendliness, had set the momentum towards that direction, thanks to apple's phenomenal profit success. and media loves him, naturally, because he basically pushed computing in the way media wanted it from the start - that internet be a glorified cable television clone with minimum freedom on user part.
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Really RMS? Sorry but this was nothing but grandstanding.
For criticism to have any value it must be constructive. Steve Jobs can not change anything he has done so this is in now way constructive.
Is this hurt full.
Yes.
People have lost their friend, husband, father, and mentor.
This makes RMS a small petty man that puts his ideology above his humanity. It would be far better to wait and criticize after some time has passed.
As to your post I disagree.
Jobb's founded Apple which is the only hardware company from the early days of personal computing that is still making personal computers. Not even IBM is still in that market much less Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, TI, RadioShack, Heathkit, Altar, Osbourne, or any number of other companies that started around the same time.
He helped make the GUI mainstream. Yes Xerox invented but they didn't do anything with it. Apple traded Xerox a bunch of stock and too the GUI and put into the hands of the public.
He also showed that Unix could be used be user friendly when he started NeXT.
He also turned around Pixar.
He went back to Apple and turned that company around. He changed the way that the music industry sold music and pushed for them to drop DRM.
While CEO Apple redefined what a smartphone was and how it should work.
While CEO Apple made tablets a viable option for the public at large.
He took Apple from the brink of death to become the most valuable company on the stock exchange.
Let's not forget that Apple employees on the whole are happy and well paid. Apple even did respond when it's subs where not treating their employee's well. One can say they didn't do enough but you better jump down the throats of everyone else that uses Foxconn which is about everybody and they did even less.
Yes he really is in the same category as Edison and Ford. Far from perfect but with accomplishments that will be historical on scope. Had he lived to ripe old age and passed away long after his retirement you would see this display. Thing is that he didn't die at 80 he died at the young age of 56. he had at least ten more years before retirement.
At this point anything really negative is just being cruel and petty.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
some even asking to the Free Software movement to find a new voice."
Fuck those people. I'm surprised anyone can both worship Apple and pretend to care about Free Software.
Jobs was a successful manager, but an abrasive, unashamed misanthrope who treated people who worked with him like shit. He and Gates came up with some good UI ideas between them in the 70s and 80s (which they then mostly stole from each other), but pretty much everything he's done with Apple done in the past ten years or more is pure evil. He was likely a genius, and had a passionate and magnetic personality. But he was not a good person. Accomplishing great things does not excuse being evil.
Many, many posts, critical of Jobs, have disappeared from the Mac Rumors forums. I know their very nature is of Mac-Fandom but to remove not only many posts but also entire thread is stooping very, very low.
Mac Rumors should be ashamed of themselves.
I am stick with Slashdot!!!
: )
At least one reasonable voice - and from the person I don't like that much!
regarding 1984isaton of Apple - who can argue? It is much more restrict than the Soviet system. Look at their iPad/Pod restrictions or their war with Samsung.
Personally I think RMS is, er, a tad disconnected from reality at times, and this is sometimes clearly noticeable in the software he's involved with (eg info su, last section). Then again, some good has come of what he's done. Without dissent there can be no discussion, and discussion is a useful thing to help sharpen your own views.
That goes for Jobs too: Whatever else he did bring a strong vision. How different this is from that other big software person, who's just amassed lots of money by stiffling innovation while claiming to champion same. As such, Steve will be missed for his ideas if a bit less for the walling of his gardens. Though the company isn't going to go away, and neither are its practices. RMS would be missed for his dissent if a bit less for his solid reasoning. The other guy, won't be missed.
So while I may not agree with his stance nor his tone, I don't actually mind very much him excercising his right to say whatever he wants, and contrary to many, many others, he does have something to say now and then. And, sheesh, if it's his personal blog then bleedin' have the grace to take it as a personal uttering and not an official stance.
The downside is that his companies success with walled gardens is giving a lot of other companies and developers the same idea of creating walled gardens where you never own anything, can't modify it, etc. A kind of kind of feudalistic computing.
Feudalistic home computing began in the mid-1980s, long before the iPhone. Think Atari 7800, which used RSA-signed binaries, and Nintendo Entertainment System, which used a cryptographic handshake between matching microcontrollers in the console and the Game Pak.
If anyone wants to know just how disconnected from reality much of the "free" software world is, all he has to do is pat attention to Stallman's idiocy about this. Stallman certainly looks like a fool, as he frequently does, but the real news is that some of his supporters are so clueless and blind that they support him on this. If you're too stupid to understand why this statement was absurd and guaranteed to make you look foolish, then you're not bright enough to even try to influence popular opinion.
Interesting choice of words. I'm not sure if "Mr. Bill" is a reference to Bill Gates or Mr. Bill from Saturday Night Live. Because I actually think SNL's Mr. Bill does deserve to die. Have you seen what they do to that guy? Every episode they're either running him over or chopping off some body part... they should just let him rest in peace. And in pieces, in his case.
Of course, now this makes me wonder if SNL's Mr. Bill started out as someone's sick commentary on Mr. Gates. Perhaps the creator's computer blue-screened when Office tried to load Clippy, and he started composing these skits while he waited for the reboot. "It looks like you're trying to write a letter. What you do is-- OH NOOO... I got a paper cut and it severed my arm! Oh NOOOOO...."
Even normal newspapers and TV shows are reporting a LOT about his dead, at least here in the Netherlands. I do not read all newspapers, but the http://nrc.nl and http://vk.nl did put it at their front page. And also a well watched daily prime time talk-show, http://dewerelddraaitdoor.vara.nl/, had one complete show just talking about Steve Jobs. People watching this show are definitely not geeks.
Jobs wasn't a great innovator in technology, but he was a pretty great salesman and marketer. One of his greatest marketing campaigns was convincing people that he was some sort of fantastic technological innovator.
His second great achievement was having a pretty plastic shell designed for a bucket of computer innards and then charging double over the nearest competing product, and actually making sales.
Third, he recognized the power of good design in both the interface and the a fore mentioned pretty plastic shell. While I've listed this third, it is probably his greatest, longest lasting, and closest to technical innovation. Apple, as a company, really gets design. It shows in every single one of their products, and often times has won out over functionality. I wish more companies got design at the same fundamental level, but integrated it better with function.
Fourth, Steve Jobs managed to get a whole generation to believe that they were thinking differently by purchasing the same computer.
RMS talks about greed and freedom. But this is the man who insists on renaming somebody else's operating system, Linux, to GNU/Linux because they used his free shit to make it. So what is it Dick, is your shit not really free? Linux owns the trademark for Linux, the and GNU is owned by your cronies.
Does that mean that if I come up with my own kernel, lets call it Assfuck, using your GNU shit, calling it GNU/Assfuck is appropriate?
Job was a visionary, zealot, and a control freak who demanded things his way. That made him a dick. But RMS is also a visionary, zealot, control freak who demands things his way as well; that makes him just as big a dick as Jobs.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
As if Jobs held a flame to Tesla et al
It's not the end : Jobs is gone, RMS still there... and his battle isn't lost.
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
... notice how the latimes blog comments section needs a facebook login.
And facebook are fascists about what email address you may use, how old you may be (born in 1905 is "not elegible to sign up", as well as being under 13), or even what names are acceptable. Must be first name, last name exactly and your parents had better comply with facebook's latest acceptable naming approval bot when they named you at least 13 years ago or you're still SOL. Assuming you're goving them your real name, which is an assumption right out of tune with the wider internet, and bloody dangerous for you too.
More and more content, not just "community comments", requires a facebook login, because "everyone has one". For now it saves me a lot of time because people that stupid can't have much worthwhile to share, but as a trend, it's worrying. And not just because of facebook's abysmal privacy track record.
Will we let them get away with anyone walling large chunks of the internet? Then why are we letting facebook getting away with it?
I've been using apple products for almost 30 years. I don't like the direction aspects of apple are moving, I like being able to install apps that I want on my mac. I wish connectors would stay consistent for more than a year or two. I wish their products weren't so expensive.
I see Steve Jobs passing as a cultural milestone for the technology community (maybe a larger community, I am not sure). Would you ridicule people who cried when John Lennon or JFK died? Did most of those people know these individuals? I doubt it. Steve Jobs stood for something larger (for some people). He was an underdog, fired from his own company, came back at the darkest hour and turned it into one of the largest companies in the world. His influence is widely felt. Did he invent the mouse? No, he helped bring it to the masses. Did he invent the GUI? No, he helped bring it to the masses. etc, etc... His influence is present in my life, through the computers and phone I use.
I worry RMS's vision of the future would lead to a technological elite, where a subset few can truly use technology because the barriers are built high.
Why can't I enjoy a product thats aesthetically pleasant?
Oh jeez :-O###
I'm mostly supportive of Stallman but I really wish he would improve his personal hygiene a little. Dress decently (glad to see he's not wearing a poncho there), keep his hair and beard tidy, wear closed shoes and not eat things stuck to his foot x_x
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Most people who know of Steve Jobs don't think he was a saint, although they respect him for a lot of the things he accomplished.
Would you say that most people who know of Stallman don't think he's an asshole?
Exactly. It's the old power vs freedom problem. Pursuing absolute freedom is stupid: when you increase someone's freedom at the expense of the freedom of someone else, you are not increasing freedom globally.
The freedom to harm others (physically or, in Stallman's view, by depriving them of the right to change the software they use) is better called "power", and that is not desirable in itself.
Apple is a company with a fanbase, not a person. The death of one man won't change the way they do business, nor dissolve the crowd of zealots.
That said, someone had say something against the annoying personal cult of him. What happened in the news was completely blown out of proportion. He was not the most important person in technology, and was not an innovator. He was a businessman and a designer, who got most of his "innovative" ideas from the other Steve at Apple.
Stallman was just voicing his long and honestly held beliefs that a free and open software environment is a major benefit to society, and that closed systems such as promulgated by Jobs is not in people's best interests, but is only in the best interest of those who own the system - Jobs/Apple in this case. Yes, Jobs was a brilliant visionary and executor of his vision, but that vision was to limit people's choices to those he approved of. If our government were to do that (oops, they must have read his book) we would be up in arms...
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
This article did not need attention from /. ; It is very unfortunate to read how emotion-driven the comments are, here and there. Not to mention the anti-racist comment which generalizes on european english accents; Or the taliban comparison to RMS (on readwriteweb).
Talk about the mote in RMS's eye! (Or Job's for that matter.)
It's a shame everyone posts there with their guts instead of their brains, and quite the shame on /. !
This is something I've been thinking about lately with the iTuned movie rentals versus the "free" with advertising internet model. If people actually pay for something, the producer has an incentive to actually produce something people would want to watch. Moreover, there is still incentive to produce quality material for niche markets because you can charge more and make up for having fewer viewers. Not to mention, it's a simpler model so less of that money gets lost in the overhead.
On the other hand, having advertisers means only shows that a large number of people want to see can find the money to do a quality job. And not only that, but only shows that advertisers will want associated with their products will get produced.
Stallman is an idiot-savant. He's right about free software principles in general but he's a inflexible fanatic. He's a talented developer (or at least was) but he lacks all sense of appropriate social interaction with a community at large. As it has been for a long time FOSS is hurt more than it is helped by RMS and we should find a new voice. Being a leaderless collective makes that difficult and people like RMS use that to their benefit. He is our Al Sharpton/Sarah Palin/Michelle Bachman/Nancy Pelosi/etc. A self-aggrandizing and out of touch leader who we should distance ourselves from. It's not that he hasn't done good it's that he's blind and intolerant and the longer we make excuses for him the more we sound like idiots who make excuses for bigots, idiots, and fanatics because we happen to agree with his core principles. I for one am tired of having RMS be the voice of FOSS.
Is he right about Jobs, IMO?...probably...that said it doesn't matter, he's clueless, fanatical and as a spokesman incompetent. He is hurting FOSS way more than he is helping it.
Problem is... Stallman isn't bad with speech if you listen to his whole speeches. But he says what he think, so it's easy to find pseudo controversial out of context quote. Plus it seems lots of people find it offensive just because he refuses to "round the angles".
I guess if your going to advertise freedom, it make sense if your spoke person feel free to speak without censuring himself.
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
Most people want function. That seems to require a "walled garden." Considering these people won't be developing their own apps, do we worry about freedom in that context? It's like demanding that Burger King make you a filet mignon. For convenience, we trade off a lot of flexibility.
He was careful not to celebrate death. Steve Jobs was a real human, and we should care about our fellow human beings, considering every death with sadness. However, Steve Jobs was not a great man, and the effects of him and the company he co-founded on the computer industry have not generally been positive.
As in Portal 2, we may not want him dead, but we can be happy he's not part of the computer industry anymore, and regret that he ever had as much influence as he did.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I would hate for this posting to promote the idea that open source is crappy unpolished garbage. The Stallman idea of "Free Software" is for sure popular but not the only school of though regarding free software. Rather than lament on the meaning of FREE and push towards Communism, there are plenty of developers who still are interested in making money in a way where they are not the only people who can benefit from their work. Ironically, the GNU software idealism is actually more conservative than several other types of open source software that comes with little or no restrictions at all. Plenty of Apple software included in their distribution of UNIX falls into that category. I am a software developer myself of the FreeSWITCH product http://www.freeswitch.org we operate under the Mozilla and BSD licensees which allow people to share and distribute software for business use as well as keeping it open and contribute back. I think basically if Stallman is happy to see Jobs go, there needs to be a replacement soon because no fanatic should go unchallenged. Apple is far from perfect but since the main topic of this post is regarding the Free Software Foundation and its views and potential pollution of the name of open source software I will leave it at the fact that the guy is dead and without him it could have taken a lot longer for us to have a way to comment on his death from the comfort of our own homes and open source software is a good thing.
come on, Jobs wasn't the nicest guy, he wasn't the best programmer, he wasn't someone who was known for his charities, (I know he had some charities, but they were few), he wasnt an innovator. For me he was a really good businessman, nothing else. He just knew who to get associated with, like what he did with Steve Wozniak. As a person he didn't seem like nice guy. After some point when you start accumulating the amount of money he had it doesnt seem really ethic. One person having so much when others have so little. He (and Apple) sue everyone they could for patents or copyrights for everything that resembled an ipod, iphone, or had an "I" on front of their name , stopping innovation. From my point of view, the way Apple stays ahead of everyone because they basically control the chip market and distributors, and not because they come up with new Ideas that no one thought of before. I never read anything that Jobs said that "opened my eyes" or thought what incredible guy he was. ( and i spend most of my time on the internets ) I read a lot of bullshit over the Internet, FB, an other places about Steve Jobs, and incredible person that pass away. It seems like people are more interested in idolizing people that make money.
There's no one today in the tech world who can easily claim he's not been affected by RMS's works. It's funny that Apple's Xcode uses FSF's GCC.
But he's a lot like super fanboys of Apple: blind about their own choice and thinking that others who don't use what they use have a problem. Calling others fool because they use Apple products is not a great way of achieving any constructive goal.
What saddens me is seeing people who think that liking one of these good things also means hating others. I'm a big fan of Apple, but I'm also a big fan of FSF, Google, and others too.
Today I spent most of time using Emacs on a MacBook Air.
"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing."
But the deification of Jobs has begun. He will become an "iCon for the 21st Century" (even though we still have 90 more years to go and something just might happen to eclipse his contribution). People will forget that he was difficult to work for and not a particularly pleasant person to be around. They'll forget that he didn't invent the things that he became known for (the mouse, MP3 players, smart phones, etc.). Forget the bad; embellish the good.
Of course, there are the fanbois who talk about Jobs death just because it's "the thing" to do. Then there seems to be a large percentage of the population that enjoy the collective public grief experience: they have no real relationship to the deceased, but they leave flowers and pictures and hold vigils and weep and wail. Then there are those that see this as an opportunity to become "part" of something bigger that they will ever be. And then there are those, like Stallman, that see it as an opportunity to advance their own agenda.
Steve Jobs had good business and design sense, had success with a particular business model that had failed for many others (including Tandy, Yahoo and AOL) and led a creative team to achieve something notable. But he offered little, if anything, that was truly original. Even the keynote phrase of his famous Stanford speech was borrowed (with attribution from the Whole Earth Catalog).
Gave us "Better Stuff"? Certainly, but nothing new there. Nothing original to see. Move along citizen. Move along.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Steve Jobs and Richard Stallman are not diametric opposites. Both visionaries have inspired and promoted a lot of individual freedom and creativity, but both leaders have very strong ideas about the environment and ecosystem in which those freedoms should be expressed. Both men do not fully trust the communities that they have created and want to retain control by imposing various restrictions in the name of preserving and protecting freedom. Neither trusts "the market" and believes that consumers will act in their own, best, long-term interest. They both have been very successful, in their own way, leveraging that theme. The animosity stems from not wanting to admit how similar they are in their approach.
RMS is allowed to be sobering about his point of view.
I think RMS is wrong. I think that Steve didn't restrict people's freedom. You're still free to buy Android, winmo, meego, etc. Other than freedom and openness, I don't see a compelling reason.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Yes the GPLv3 closed loopholes you could use to completely go against the spirit of the GPLv2 and lock down open source software. OH NOES!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Steve or anybody else has the freedom to design and sell software and hardware with whatever legal terms they want - as long as they are legal. If RMS hates that freedom then he isn't my spokesman for free software. He is just an old communist! And I don't like communists!
For some reason on reading this story and remembering the recent fawning news articles on Mr Jobs following his untimely death the following sprung to mind...
To misquote the bard:
Friends, Apple users, Countrymen, lend us your ears;
We come to bury Jobs, not to critique him.
The good that men do lives after them;
The evil is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Jobs.
All visionaries are arseholes. It's in the job description.
Doesn't mean they have to be a dick though.
Too soon.
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Jobs was the man behind the closed Mac (anyone remember the 128KB Mac with 1 floppy and a pair of RS-422 ports)?
The iPhone and iPad (and iPod Touch) marketplace is also closed to ensure Apple gets a piece of the action.
Mac OS-- and Mac OS X, which I rather happen to like because it's "just another Unix/Linux deviant"-- has been bound to hardware to ensure a higher profit margin on the hardware.
Apple fanboys aren't as fanatical as Harley-Davidson fans... but, when we see people having the logo tatooed on their bodies it'll make the transition.
No one can walk this earth without making mistakes.
Just as people extolled all of the "wonderful" things Ronald Reagan was credited with once he was dead I find it stupid to treat Steve Jobs as if he was the second coming.
Yes, he's done things worthy of credit but let us not forget that he had plenty of flaws, too.
Stallman eats toe jam, tells pregnant women they should have abortions, and smells like rotten cheese. His only accomplishments in life are some hackish bad source code and spreading lies to further his socialist agenda.
Just another talking head.
Move along, its not Jesus, again.
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Stallman's comments remind me of fundamentalist religious zealots' view on other people's beliefs, i.e. that people with other views than themselves are evil.
Seriously, is there not a chance that computing has room for OpenSource AND proprietary, and that both a buttoned down approach and an open approach have their merits?
I don't see open source tools as being particularly nice to use in general, and I don't see Apple products as being a hacker's paradise. Apple and Microsoft products generally tend to support my work and play much better, yet I also use open source stuff
Jobs could get away with being a bit of an asshole sometimes because he was really good at his job. Stallman seems just to be an asshole who used to do pretty clever and good stuff but has become embittered that his work hasn't taken off in the way that Jobs' work did. Stallman, just put your money where your mouth is and make open source stuff that can compete on quality, because it is obvious that only competing on price (even at a zero price point) isn't enough. And please don't do any more to mark the open source community as a bunch of religious zealots who believe that open=good and proprietary=evil. That only makes open source into a cult which gets shunned by the rest of the computing world.
FWIW, I own a MacBook Air and an iPhone 3GS.
People who view Apple as an enabler of freedom are those who think the same thing of their EZpass for road tolls. Someday, they will see their "internal passport" as an enabler of travel.
The fact is, that the "1984" campaign was a propaganda ruse. Jobs and Hertzfeld and crew were already working with DARPA and the spooks.
Read all of the following - including the links - and understand that it is no exaggeration to understand that with the introduction of "Siri", George Orwell's "Telescreen" is on the verge of reality - in your pocket.
http://cryptogon.com/?p=25289
http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/13/shadowy-government-project-spins-off-siri-to-help-direct-your-affairs/
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Please illuminate us and tell us why Stallman's statement was absurd.
I like Free Software. I even call it that because I understand and appreciate the "moral" position they take. I see the GPL as a way to protect free exchange of ideas from the greedy hands of corportations trying to make a buck off our hard work. I've put plenty of my own work under the GPL.
But I don't think Stallman has thought two minutes of his life about product usability. People like me buy Macs and accept the compromise to software freedom because we're tired of growing gray hairs fighting bad Free Software.
I really enjoy computer science, but damnit, I hate computers. And by that, I mean personal computers as they are programmed for us to use. I lose way too much of my time trying to get the damn things to work and do stuff that in the 21st century should be completely automatic and self-correcting. More than any other company, Apple makes usability a priority, so at the end of the day, Macs make me feel a little less worn out.
It's not like that in general at all. The difference between a tool that works and a tool that works easily for children that have never seen it before it a lot of hard and boring work that requires a lot of dedication or a paycheck. Typically it's done by very different people which is why in highly polished commercial software there are sometimes serious disconnections between the underlying tool and it's interface, or a nice interface to a very poor tool.
Then of course there are some things where text or some other machine accessable method is the best interface instead of pretty pictures to point at. It's hard to script mouse movements and GUI button presses for anything you want to run many times, then there's the concept of piping input from one little program to the next. In such situations it would be nice to have a secondary GUI but that is extra work and it may be impractical anyway (eg. far too many options to present clearly without a cluttered and confusing GUI). With piping you'd end up with something like LabView which would be best avoided.
As for your last comment, RMS is not a "Linux geek." He has his own projects and goals which are separate from linux even if he hinted at ownership with the LiGnuX and gnu/linux sillyness. He was involved with various tools used with linux and drafted the licence linux uses but not a single line of the kernel.
'Nuf said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
I personally agree 100% with Mr. Stallman. Mr. Stallman made me, and many of you, able to use free software asking nothing in return. What has Mr. Jobs ever did for me and computing? Nothing, he was a greedy businessman trying to lock his fool customers in any possible way. He took what he needed from free or academic software without giving any credit whatsoever. Mr. Stallman has said what he thinks, as usual. Free speech is the base for free world. Hypocritical behaviors or silence are not.
There's no one today in the tech world who can easily claim he's not been affected by RMS's works. It's funny that Apple's Xcode uses FSF's GCC.
Used to use. It's still installed for people who don't want to change, but the default compiler is clang. And thanks heavens for that.
...will always refuse to admit that Jobs was worse than Gates ever was. Apple has become worse (they didn't always used to be) than MS ever was...
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I don't use any Apple products for the same reasons Stallman mentioned in his tiny little opinion post on his personal blog. The fact that some want to cast out the founder of the "free software movement", for having an expression of free speech, really makes me laugh. Good luck getting them to fire him for practicing free speech.
For the win.
How can a man who lived his life being a total jerk to everyone, from his friends, his family, his employees, his fans, journalists covering him or his products, etc, still be treated like a saint when he dies, and yet then everyone condemns anyone who has enough objectivity or honesty to speak their mind against the person? Stallman may be an easy target for criticism himself, but that doesn't change anything in this case.
No matter who you like or which platform you prefer, let's engage OBJECT-O VISION.
Steve Jobs was a business man. A man who spent his life making, largely, second-class products. The Apple II may have been a huge piece of history, but the truth is that Steve Jobs played no part in its design or construction. That was all Woz, just like with the Apple I. Jobs simply played the business man and got it onto the market. The computers Jobs did have a hand in helping to design, the Apple Lisa and Apple III, were total flops (partially due to not listening to Woz's advice), and part of why Steve Jobs was canned from the company (the other part being dreadful personality.) As for the Mac, while it was mildly successful early on, it was and is still not the dominant computer platform, making up a small fraction of the marketshare even today. Then there's NeXT, where both the hardware and the operating system were never a commercial success. And Pixar already existed before Steve Jobs ever bought it, so he simply threw money at an already very successful group of people who would have very likely still done fine without him.
Returning to Apple, which by that point was an absolute failure as a company, they were able to rebrand a failed operating system (NeXTstep/Openstep) with a colorful interface, put it on colorful machines which were essentially no different than the beige boxes the company previously sold, and then poured coal in the marketing engine. And, since Steve Jobs was a good business man, this worked. Even if this is akin to a car salesman putting paint on a rusty car to make a sale, you still have to acknowledge that sales improved.
The iPod was certainly nothing that hadn't already been done, it was just marketed very well. Same with the iPhone, and the iPad. They took already existing devices on the market and made them look very pretty, and since consumers are suckers for that, they will pay anything to have it. And in this society of credit card-fueled impulse purchases, that's what happened. iTunes helped all of this too, of course, but again, that's thanks to Steve's business side being able to bring record companies into the fold.
The thing that nobody wants to really admit though is that Apple, much like all other large companies, designs products by committee. Steve Jobs did not personally invent or design any of them. Apple's product engineers made products, and Steve simply yelled at them until they made one he liked. This is still an objective statement, because it's very well documented by employees (and not just at Apple.)
OBJECT-O VISION is over.
Let's also not forget that Steve cut out Apple's philanthropic programs when he returned to Apple, citing budget considerations. But then when Apple was rolling in the dough, they were never re-instated. And of course there's all the classic tales of him being a jerk to others, which are too many to list here. But it's worth reminding everyone that he wasn't above screwing over even Woz, the man who would later make him filthy rich.
Steve Jobs was not an inventor, an engineer, an innovator, or any of these outlandish labels being applied to him. He was not another Edison. He was not another Einstein. He was not Henry Ford, Princess Diana, or any other historical figure by which you might try to one-up the last comparison with. You might could call him a visionary, but I think that was largely centered around increasing his ego and his bottom line rather than benefiting people. Steve was not a humanitarian by any definition of the word. He didn't even contribute to
Hello, Blue boxes.
You are willing to praise a thief? You're a fucking fool.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
People should learn about freedom of speech and Stallman should accept the diversity of the world (the computing world included).
(1) Better and Free > (2) Better and Not Free > (3) Free
Richard Stallman, rather than bashing Apple and all those whom you oppose, how about working move your offerings from (3) to (1).
I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
And you make the difference because the V8 is a central feature of that SUV.
There was also the crying about how Android wasn't right because they used Linux Kernel but not the GPL userland and not using the GPL userland meant that they could keep the android userland closed.
Lots of complaining there about how they shouldn't be calling their system Linux just because they're using the linux kernel and that ought to mean a GPL userland because it was confusing.
Yet that confusion is because you refuse to accept that there's a difference between using the Linux kernel and having a "Linux OS" which contains the GPL userland.
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Steve was a great businessman, an expletive as a person, and a poor and light-fingered technologist. Guess it depends whether one admires theft and leadership or deceny and progress. What a character, to be so diverse on qualitiers often found together in synch, if at all.
But to put Steve Jobs in the same league as people like Alan Turing, or Ada Lovelace, or Charles Babbage seems... very wrong.
Why? You don't know any more about Turing, Lovelace or Babbage than you do about Jobs. You're engaging in the same sort of hero worship you seem to be railing against. All of them did important work on different pieces of the technology puzzle. You might be more interested in the work of Turing (which is fine) but that doesn't make him more or less worthy of admiration. Jobs couldn't do what Turing did and Turing couldn't have done what Jobs did. Most of us only have the vaguest third-person idea of what sort of people they were so we can only really judge them by their works.
I've usually avoided Apple products after the original iPod, but I will buy the iPhone 4GS just to stick it to RMS and his ilk. I vote with my wallet.
I'm probably going to get flamed for this but at the time linux started the GNU stuff was mostly just free rewrites of the tools that came with SunOS. It also wasn't the only free software available at the time. The GPL licence was impressive but with linux we can't really give RMS credit for more than inspiration about how to share the thing. Comparing hurd or emacs and linux you can see a major contrast between a tightly closed group that is very hard to enter and a more collaborative project. As shown with the attempted ownership of the name with the silly LiGnuX and gnu/linux renaming it is just reflected glory, which is pathetic really because GNU have had some major achievements of their own they should have been shouting about (eg. gcc is far more impressive now than it was).
From slavery to sexism exercising traditions unquestioningly has no justification. Appeal to tradition is a logical fallacy as well.
If people want to attack you because you are breaking their silly traditions, forget them- they are not acting rationally!
I hate it when people only speak well of the dead, even when they are bastards. Its not as if you are protesting against civil rights at funerals in the face of the people trying to morn... Being unkind to those who feel bad is a different matter. People who are touchy shouldn't be digging around the internet to find people they do not know saying things they do not like and condemning them for allowing somebody to hunt for it... or to shame them for disregarding their silly beliefs.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Boring, yawn... I mean, yeah, I get his point, but the overall arching thing about Stallman is that he's just a big of a piece of crap self promoting human being as Jobs was, except that he doesn't shower enough, all his stuff is ugly. Pretty much, he's just a jealous type that ultimately wants to have this little revolution of different rules so he can be in charge, so like, what's the difference between Stallman and Jobs really? At least Job's products from Apple actually look cool and work.
RMS will never contribute anything of anywhere near as much value to society as Apple has.
He's a zealot and is willing to compromise any level of technological progress for his personal ideals.
Seriously, if RMS had his way, we'll all still be running 80 column green screens with EMACS, no real security, no real hardware driver support for anything more complex than a serial TTY, etc.
News flash, old hippy: people want to use their computers, etc to do tasks. Not for the sake of using/programming the device. The average joe is WILLING TO PAY someone to make it easy to use. Apple capitalised on this idea. As has Microsoft.
The free software world hasn't even managed to get to where windows 98 was 13 years ago, either in terms of user interface, 3d hardware support, hardware plug and play, etc.
And I say this as someone who was waiting for the year of the Linux desktop since 1996. I believe a large part of this not happening is due to the GPL.
Whilst the GNU zealots in the linux camp are rejecting things such as binary drivers, DTRACE, ZFS, CLANG/LLVM, Grand Central, etc, FreeBSD and others are jumping on board.
I suspect that in the next couple of years Linux on the desktop as an idea is going to get left in the dust by everyone else while they remain squabbling over licensing issues and NIH syndrome rather than actually getting things done.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
And to the world's non-nerd population, it just gives the impression that free software is for socially inept bearded types.
99.99% of the world's non-nerd population is probably entirely unaware of his existence, so he has no influence, negative or positive, upon them.
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It certainly has been a horrible experience with OS/X. I don't get to do anything unnatural with the installer. A few buttons and I was done. And the easy on the eye colors. Pathetic! Where are my jarring Gnome schemes? Installers that just work. Where is the fun in that? Tools that don't take days to find out how to use. Everything just works and I have nothing to hack on. This leaves me with the devastating result of working on my actual job assignments. Please, someone take this desktop away! It is ruining my herd reputation. (P.S. I love Linux and open source but the desktop environments are by-and-large inferior human interfaces.)
Well, duh.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
So has anyone sent RMS an iPod for his birthday? :)
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I had a DECStation 5000 for years, complete with the giant Big-Mac sized round mouse.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Jeez Richard, show some class. The man just died of cancer. Show a little respect. There will be plenty of time to criticize his actions later on. For now, just leave it be and allow is friends and family to mourn.
Even Ballmer looks better than Stallman right now. At least Ballmer put up a sympathy notice and then kept his mouth shut.
or: It's the UI, stupid!
It's unfortunate that Stallman has allowed his ideology to blind him for Jobs' accomplishments. Yes, you can moan about walled gardens, but Steve Jobs made computing accessible to the masses. Without that, you can have all the openness you want, but only a small number of people will be able to enjoy it.
I remember the bad old days. Before 1984, computers were inscrutable and required lots of training to use. The Macintosh changed all that; it made it obvious that there was a better way than the 'everyone invents their own interface' hell that existed before. This, much more than the iPhone and what have you is Jobs's lasting legacy. Those who dismiss Jobs' contribution to society as eye candy are missing the point.
Maybe Stallman's sour grapes are due to the realization that Jobs' contribution is impossible in a FOSS-only world. It's been 30 years since computers became affordable to the general public. I haven't seen much in the way of user interface innovation from the FOSS world.
You need a dictator to decide on a uniform user interface, and you need a dictator to enforce that against everyone's objections.
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Jobs was same type of "inventor" and "visionary" as another American icon, Edison.
Sure a big one, if it mean to improve someone's else invention, or to steal it outright.
Less than 100 years later, what Edison's invention do we use? The bulb is already prohibited in developed world. Or let's play some new cylinders on phonograph...
One thing for sure, he knew how to sell overpriced beautiful things.
5 years from now, will there be Apple at all?
I'll wager that the bits of your personal rant above passed through multiple network devices and servers running GPL'd code to get to Slashdot's server. While you obviously do not like or understand RMS, he's probably contributed more function, both technically and philosophically, to the computing world than Mr. Jobs.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
I never understood why Apple and Google get a pass from the same Microsoft hating people who claim to give a rats ass about freedom and openness. I hope fanboyism for all platforms dies. We are all better off in a world where operating systems are viewed as commodities and companies are judged on actual merit rather than sports teams.
Is developing a closed ecosystem where all applications require central approval (Subject to arbitrary corporate value judgements) before they can execute open or free?
Is explicitly denying competing applications a market share open or free?
What about controlling the hardware? Godsake the battery is not even user replacable.
It is a false choice to have to choose between malware and a closed ecosystem. It is quite possible to create a secure fenced environment for every app.
It is impossible for a central authority to vett every application with 100% degree of certainty. If Apple can't stop all security bugs in their own software how do they intend to be able to do the same for the half million apps in its appstore? Judging by a number of revocations after approval the answer is they obviously they can't.
Jobs was an asshole too.
Apple is becoming worse than Oracle, but the masses are too stupid to realize it.
BTW, Larry E., D. Trump, and the list goes on - all assholes.
Most politicians are too, just not to your face.
Aren't most leaders for extremely well-known corporations assholes?
the influence of Jobs. Beyond that if you heard a radio piece about Henry Ford inventing the car, you'd scoff. Jobs, and Ford before him, were sharp people who were able to recognize when a product could be repackaged in a way that would make them the main purveyor of that product. I'd say Ford was actually quite a bit more influential, but in both cases the things they did would have been done anyway by someone. Perhaps tablets wouldn't have become popular until 2015 and maybe cars would have taken 5 more years to get cheap and affordable, but it still would have happened. Honestly I don't put a lot of stock on the whole 'Great Man' theory of history. Individuals may well influence the details of what happens and maybe change the timing slightly, but tablets existed before Jobs, and someone would have made one like the iPad (I'd consider Amazon for instance) eventually.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I've met Richard Stallman, and he's a dick. In fact, he's one of those people that gets under your skin just being around the guy. I couldn't be in the room with him for more than 10 minutes, and listening to him speak always makes me cringe. But Richard Stallman is the high priest of the temple of Free Software. He is the chief proclaimer of The Faith, and as such it is his job to be uncompromising and dogmatic in his beliefs, even to a fault. Stallman's job is to carry the standard for the movement, and to wave that flag in people's faces. He's there to keep the faithful on the path, and to call us out when we fall from grace. Because of this role, he's almost always off-putting and annoying. People who expect Stallman to be sensitive or political or to sugarcoat his comments, don't understand the man and his place in the universe. I don't like RMS personally, in fact I quite dislike him. But I recognize his place in a movement in which I believe in, and I recognize that his role doesn't depend upon whether or not he is liked. In fact, I would say that if the day comes that people like RMS, it's the day that he's stopped doing his job.
...but I have to agree with the blog linked at the end of the story: His abrasive form of Free Software evangelism has become more of a liability than an asset to the very cause he seeks to promote.
Jobs + Stallman have at least some history together.
wasn't Objective C, which is what all OSX is based on and uses,... wasn't that developed jointly with GNU?
Where Jobs took it.. Stallman might be a little miffed
In addition to all the other stuff
Does anyone know the real background of it?
ya filthy hippie!
I'm guessing the people that don't understand Jobs' influence are probably recent college grads that didn't grow up in the 80s. Jobs influence doesn't just extend to iPad and iPhone made by Apple, but to pretty much every tech company and everyone that has ever used a computer since the beginning of the personal computer age.
Here's a statement that will cause your head to explode: Steve Jobs was responsible for a large percentage of the world's GDP and America's status over the last quarter century.
Would anyone use a computer today without the mouse-based GUI? Maybe the nerds, but no one else. Steve made the connection that the GUI would be the way the average person would use a computer. The inventors certainly didn't make that connection. So now Microsoft Windows exists because of Steve Jobs. Bill Gates certainly wouldn't have made it had it not been for Steve Jobs promoting the GUI concept to the public, starting with an ad on the Superbowl no less.
He got rid of instruction manuals from computers. Would anyone use computers if they had to read 500 pages of instruction manuals? The idiots back in the 80's got into pissing matches to compete over which computers had a bigger instruction manual! Stallman is one of those morons. He wanted everyone to be an expert on computers to use them, which is the opposite of good.
Meanwhile, as Jobs got rid of instruction manuals, he created Desktop Publishing. That alone puts him on the level of Johannes Gutenberg. The Xerox PARC guys certainly didn't care about it enough to find it usable.
The World Wide Web was invented on a NeXT computer that Steve Jobs made, because it had an easier development platform than other systems. Would the web exist without NeXT? Actually, would the web exist without HyperCard being promoted everywhere by Apple years before the Tim Berners Lee made the first web browser? (on a GUI?) Do you REALLY think the web would be invented without Steve Jobs? The non-GUI Gopher already existed, but no one used that.
Just the fact that we're talking alternative what-if scenarios indicate Job's success, since regardless of what-ifs, Jobs actually DID IT.
(would Facebook exist without the web? Would the Arab spring revolution have happened without that?)
Even the most pissy people about Steve Jobs actually uses his products every day. The low-power ARM CPU that all the Android fanboys love these days was designed by a company co-founded by ... you guessed it: Apple. This was to implement the Newton PDA, the overall concept which was described in detail by Steve Jobs in the early 80's.
His influence goes right up to today, with Siri for example. In fact, here's an interview with Steve Jobs from 1984, talking about Siri: http://newsweek.tumblr.com/post/11109366062/steve-jobs-basically-introduces-siri-in-1984
There is absolutely NO reason to underrate him, he really was THE guy that shaped modern society and brought about a true change in the world unlike anyone else over the last 30 years. There were plenty of technologists that brought about single point ideas, and in fact, Jobs didn't invent many of these ideas, but had such a string of success stories like him.
His actual brilliance was as a designer, the art-director type of person that took the complex tools, and simplified them, because he understood humanity, and understood artistic meaning behind an invention that often even the inventors didn't even understand. Other technologists would be dumbfounded if they were presented with a person that didn't give a crap about a higher-speed processor - they just wouldn't know what to do with that type of person that's more interested in how things look than the numbers behind it, because they think numbers are what matters. Billions more people care about how things look than numbers. This recognition allowed Jobs to reach those billions of people.
No politician, no other technologist, no other wealthy person changed global society as much as he did. (name one?)
So, really, let's end this debate. Steve Jobs won these last 30 years.
agreed, get over Jobs people.. he was a figure head nothing more.. don’t credit him for all the apps people written for the iPods like i have seen people doing in the last few weeks. That would be like saying the CEO of Post was like Steve because he said to put Two Scoops of raisins in the box.. guess what.. it wasn’t his idea.. no one credited him for it. so why credit Steve with the work his company did?
Jobs gave the world what it wanted. RMS did not. End of story.
That may be true, but there's a parallel to be made with the aphorism about politics, that every people deserve the government they chose. Just because Apple's way is more popular doesn't make it better.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
First of all, if Jobs was really the definition of a "greedy businessman", he would have done at least some of the following things:
1. Start selling a generic PC version of OS X, since the cost of licensing an OS is next to nothing, meaning 99% pure profit on each one after the initial costs of development are recouped.
2. Eliminate all the free workshops and classes offered in Apple retail stores, since they don't contribute anything concrete or measurable to the company's bottom line and it costs money in salaries (AND in training people to give such classes).
3. Focus on selling a low-cost machine in high volumes, for sale in major retail channels like WalMart.
Instead, I think Jobs was simply driven by a desire to see his dreams become reality. He was a very opinionated person with constant ideas on what he'd like to see happen in the personal computing world, and unlike most people, he made them into shipping products. He made it clear that he was perfectly ok with the company only having a 10% market-share in computers, too. He wasn't on a mission to outsell Microsoft or Dell, or anyone else. He simply wanted to offer people an alternative, made his way.
The international tax issue is one that needs reviewing, but it's an issue for ALL U.S.A. based companies doing business overseas. Apple themselves recently pushed for a change in U.S. tax law, because currently, you're charged a fairly high tax on all the money you earn overseas and then transfer into a U.S. based bank. For that reason, companies making money outside the U.S. wind up encouraged to SPEND it there (on such things as expanding their overseas operations), rather than take a tax hit for investing it back home in the U.S.
I'm not entirely certain Jobs invented anything. He seems to have assumed the mantle of those who did actual creation rather well.
I think a lot of people are missing the point - nobody will remember steve jobs for Mac OSX.
They will remember him for the ipod, macbook air, mac mini, ipad series etc.
Whatever your views on their corporate behaviour, you have to admit it: mac laptops are shiny! ;)
None of this makes him a better or worse person, but all the talk about Apple's legal disputes and software derived from UNIX is missing the point. OSX is great to use, in a dull sort of way, but I much prefer debian. However, I have seen nothing as good for its size as a mac mini - even my 2008 model is better than non-apple models.
There is this http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/koolu/
CUT your hair stallman.. you are 70 years old...
and wash your mouth before talking about Steve Jobs
RMS needs to lick on these n-ts, suck the d--k.
He just wants to be on South Park...
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/153799/there-he-is ......
Here, he is..
The biggest douche of the universe....
I am definitely not an Apple fanboy, but I was deeply moved by Jobs' death. For better or for worse, Steve Jobs made a big difference in personal computing. As I reflected on my feelings, I said to myself "the only death of a figure in the tech field that I would find more moving than Jobs would probably be RMS". I'm not the biggest fan of what RMS has said about Steve Jobs here, but similar to my non-Apple-fanboyism, that won't change in the slightest my deep respect for RMS and his contribution to FOSS.
Tech websites only? Do even you look at non-tech websites? The BBC front page had a section devoted to Jobs' death plastered across the top of its main page for three days, with dozens of articles. He is on the cover of The Economist, with the leader, a full page obituary and a special section on everything he did. This is more coverage than the death of ANYBODY ELSE in the last year. The dimensions of this circle-jerk are epic; there is no way that Beiber would get the cover of The Economist.
Seriously, dude, read some of the media before commenting on it.
Taking shots at the dead guy. Stay classy Mr. Stallman.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
get a life
xerox actually invented both the mouse and the gui but the head office people were too dumb to know what a gold mine they had. they let bill gates, steve jobs and ibm copy it and run like mad.
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How many startups would have been crushed by server OS costs without GNU/Linux as an option, even just by driving down the price of competitors?
To be fair, probably zero. Nature hates an empty "ecological niche". BSD would probably have fulfilled that role. BSD would have simply used a different compiler as well.
The technology and technological options would most likely be the same, merely the politics of open source would be different.
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Jobs was the master of the locked-down platform, and he repeatedly got away with crap that would've had people screaming if Bill Gates had tried it.
But you're not allowed to say nasty things at a funeral! No, you're not allowed to say nasty things about Jobs ever, under any circumstances.
...Stallman has contributed more to technology than Steve Jobs.
I never drank the Apple kool-aid. I used a Mac once, back in the mid 1980's, and after a week, it started to piss me off - it treated me as if I was a computer imbecile, that didn't need to know what was going on behind the flashy interface. To those that believe in the cult of Jobs - that Apple produces were the pinnacle of what technology could offer - I'm sorry, but they were just another computer, running just another point and drool interface.
About time someone realized that the emperor has no clothes.
While his efforts were instrumental to personal computing (IBM wouldn't have built anything smaller than a car if Jobs hadn't been as successful as he was), I looked back last week and realized that I have never owned any apple products. I've been using computers (that I own) since 1982. I've used/operated/administered a lot of other peoples computers since that time too. I've worked in government spook houses, telephone data centers, fire/ambulance centers, I've designed and built thousands of printed circuit boards, integrated radio/gps transponders into GIS/maping databases and gobs more. And I've never owned or used any Apple products along the way. Jobs was good for computing, because he was in charge, and determined and smart, and not a computery kind of guy. Richard Stallman is smart too, but his ranting in this way is like when PETA said it was good that Steve Irwin (the crocodile hunter) died. It wasn't good that Steve or Steve died. They didn't fit the goals of the group, but it doesn't mean that they were bad. I don't like walled gardens. Jobs built walled gardens. Most everything else that Jobs did was good. Stallman absolutely hates walled gardens. Richard: attack the mans ideas that you don't like, but not the man, nor his ideas as a whole.
Steve Jobs was a very good salesman and micromanager, who revolutionized the field of packaging gadgets, made some wise investments in 3D cinema, and did not believe in sharing his incredible wealth. He will be sorely missed by greedy Apple stockholders and his family, and apparently by a billion people who really like their iPhone and think Steve Jobs "invented" it and was a "genius" inventor like Thomas Edison because they have no idea what anything means.
...and I'll say it here. Richard Stallman is an asshole who never learned proper manners.
I'm not a Mac person, wasn't ever an Apple person back in the day of the ][+, but I'm willing to let Jobs die with a bit of dignity and recognition of his good.
None of us are perfect people, and I imagine most of us would rather people didn't stand up at our funeral to say "he was a cheap jerk who stiffed me for twenty bucks."
RMS and ESR are embarrassing themselves and those who associate with them.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
basically just behaving like fred phelps to get some attention.
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They can wheel out Steve at the next demo and sell, sell, sell, the iCasket. And it syncs with iTunes!
To be fair, Apple paid them for access to all that GUI stuff.
He's a troll. Don't feed the troll.
Never, ever fuck with a hungry animal. It would also be wise not to stand between a mother and her young. Now we get to hear last word from some asshole calling out Jobs for hurting their feelings? Oh boo-hoo.
Compare records. Jobs kicks ass, hands down.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/10/stallman_glad_jobs_gone/
So, if there was not Steve Jobs, do you really think we had now afordable music for download?
I don't know that, and neither do you. I understand what you are trying to say, and I agree with your disagreement (no pun intended) towards "Have Blue"'s post. But that sentence of yours right there is quickly approaching a "gambler's fallacy" (not quite, but similar in nature.) I would also argue that the gates of affordable music got open with Napster (or sites like mp3.com back in the day), the ability to publish stuff on the Internet in conjunction with P2P clients, and MP3 technology in general.
It is hard to imagine affordable music downloads to exist at all haven't there being companies and *underground* groups with the technology that brings ripping, publication and sharing of musical content to anyone with an internet connection.
iTunes, and Amazon Music among others, simply capitalized on the market opportunity (with iTunes being the best implementation.)
06 October 2011 (Steve Jobs)
Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.
Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.
That was a incredibly poorly thought remark. The FOSS movement is a political movement as much as a technological movement. In politics, what you say and how you say it matters. FOSS already have the drawback that is composed mostly from nerds lacking social skills, to have the most visible mouthpiece of the movement expressing himself so poorly is another unnecessary obstacle. He could have said:
"Despite his death and economical success, I still believe that the vision of Steve Jobs in computing is a menace to fundamental freedoms now an in the future. I have sympathy for his family in this moments of loss, but I can't ignore the dangerous effects of his work."
Instead, what he wrote is more akin a what a teen would post to twitter after doing a tantrum. It is simply too low for the man that wrote the GPL and "The right to read".
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
OK, I'm not completely anti-Stallman, he's a smart guy and did start a great open platform that does us all some benefit, but I have to disagree with him for at least 1 major reason: Steve Jobs is one guy who simply didn't want or agree with a open system - plain and simple.
I do think Jobs was a great visionary and did the world a lot of good, mostly by being at the time and in some respects today, an underdog that pushed new manufacturing processes and spur competition (lets face it a lot of companies want Apple's business revenues by mimicking - I work for one of those companies sadly).
Sure, he wasn't down for openness and free software, ect. But first, it's a small company with a specialized set of hardware configuration that they want to work on. The key word is want. They don't have to live up to someone else's ideals plain and simple. It doesn't make him or anyone else evil or bad, or wrong. If people don't like it, either Apple's view on openness, or just their hardware - then they wouldn't buy it. Just like in the late 80s, or even like RIM's blackberries..ect.
Apple models itself as the luxury devices company, always has been marketing and working that way forever. Just like Mercedes or any other European high-retail luxury car, they are expensive, they work perfectly as intended, and generally well made - but don't complain that you can't bring it to just anyone to work on, or it costs double to open it up or to purchase. That's the point of their hardware and software design. Stallman just needs to learn to grow up, and if anything, quit talking about how great Linux is and why everyone should be using it, but to actually make it worth using for the masses - prove Steve Jobs and other anti-linux personalities wrong - some thing I believe is not possible as it would require a contradiction of the openness of it all to do so.
Is Steve Jobs wrong for making his own company his way? Is Bill Gates or IBM, or any other proprietary manufacturer? No. Is it bitching and whining to say you're glad someone doesn't exist anymore because they had a different view than your own? yes...it is no matter how you dice it.
Make something to speak your truths and you will often be proven right Mr. Stallman - I greatly await the further progress of Linux - I love Linux, I just don't love it's complete openness to make progress halt - which often happens to free and unfunded ideas sadly
xerox actually invented both the mouse
Umm, no; that was Doug Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute.
still, it's a good way to contrast the current environment to the one back then. if something similar happened today, xerox would of initiated a multi-year lawsuit against them. with the end result being something far worse for everyone.
People who do not want their computers to be video game consoles should create their own computers. They should not expect the rest of the computer buying public to pay (either through higher prices, more bugs, lower usability or any combination of these) for features that are only useful to a minority of users.
Dang it, if the public wants video game consoles, then the public should get video game consoles. Those unhapy with that state of affairs can go to Best Buy or similar, buy the required components, install Linux on said machines and enjoy their freedoms.
See, everyone happy!
You can respect Jobs for being the guy who wove it all together - much like the type of hacker who knows his way inside and out of all the tools out there, but is unable to create them himself.
There is a symbiotic relationship -- the security tool guy needs the people who actually use it, and vice versa. Respect to both parties, and respect to Steve Jobs.
Reasonable me don't change the world unreasonable men do. Keep in mind Job's was not know for being especially kind in his words and demeanour himself.
... and won't be in tears after Jobs death
Also, being a remarkable jerk when talking about a guy who died a few days ago.
Yes, yes it was.
I love the two-handed pointer, with dedicated modifier keys (which resemble piano keys in their size and pivoting movement) under the left hand, and the pointer itself under the right.
It might be said that this layout was copied, much later, as the common control mechanism for PC-based first-person games (ASFW keys under left hand, mouse in right).
Kid-proof tablet..
DRM was insisted upon by the Music companies--Apple eventually talked them out of it. Before Apple, for all intents and purposes there wasn't legal online music.
GE doesn't let you put your own software on your microwave--because it is an appliance. Do you own a microwave? then you are a hypocrite.
I'd rather have Emacs than any Apple stuff any-day. Apple just sucks.
Fuck Apple and all their fan-boys.
iTunes doesn't add DRM to music ripped from your own CDs, and never has.
DRM was at the insistence of the music companies--Apple eventually convinced them to drop it. Apple's contracts with the music companies effectively prevented them from licensing Fairplay because those contracts made Apple responsible for hiding the necessary secrets for implementing Fairplay. There was one lawsuit by Real, but they lost it.
and I chose an iPhone. I don't care that I can't easily modify the software on it; just like I don't care that I can't easily modify the software on my microwave.
I am a former Mac user. I had magazine subscriptions to MacAddict, and Macworld. I even drove 600 miles to attend the Macworld Expo SF in 98 (alone)! Not long after the original ouster of Steve, Apple began doing something that they really should have been doing from the beginning of the disassociation between computers and operating systems....They started licensing their operating system to (gasp) CLONE MANUFACTURERS! Suddenly po boys (like yours truly) were able to buy rock-solid clones that were as fast, if not much faster than their Apple-owning friends. No more smug looks to be endured for me!
In addition to myself, over 1 million new Mac OS users were born do to this move. Apple kept making and selling machines, but they did have a bit of a lag on their computer sales as a result. A decision to either be a hardware developer or a software developer was looming like a Beholder over-head. In their inability to make the decision on their own, Apple did something worse instead, they brought the dark lord Jobs back, and he immediately terminated all licensing to, and support for the clones. Down-trodden and cast aside, the now fumbling clone-owners had a tough decision to make...buy an iCrap, or switch to the much more dreaded Windows virus.... I went to Linux!
Funny part about this whole saga, it made the computer you use today possible! There was a caveat in the licensing agreement the clone makers signed that not only gave Apple the ability to terminate the contract on a whim, but also gave Apple the rights to any hardware improvements the clone makers made. That is where the Front-side cache, Back-side cache, and In-line cache came from!
-Oz
My gnu/Semen has just come all over his gnu/Beard.
I think you freetards are just upset you can't install Gnusense on your iPads. Not that you'd be able to do anything with it anyway apart from dick about with emacs.
Seems to me it's a little like the pot calling the kettle black. Yes, Jobs liked his closed-platform and saw computers and other gadgets as "appliances" to sell to people in closed boxes where you can't even change the battery. But he never said he was doing anything different, and he was very successful at it. In the end, his legacy will include his personal treatment of people, the "culture" he inspired, and the commoditization of computer-related technology.
The part RMS never seemed to understand is that not everyone views software as some kind of grail to protect. I do see his point, but most people don't, and if they did, most wouldn't care. It is a conspicuously self-centered and unyielding technologist's view of the universe.
And so I think it's a little silly to see a man who has contributed little more than his opinions to the world, maligning the reputation of a much more successful man. He may not be wrong, but who cares? Just one more opinion.
Like most of you, I have been working with computers for long enought to know this.
How many of you buttheads, going on about freedom, can't change your computer, and yada yad yad yada, has actually USED in PRODUCTION OSX? Opened the Terminal (yes that is xterm) and know that all the goodies you are used to, are there. Or can be if you are willing to put the time to compile and so on.
The big fucking difference is the fact that you get a beatiful ( actually usefull) UI, which you can CHOOSE to use, you are not MANDATED to do so.
Sure you can't get the source code for the largest part of what makes OSX, but seriously how much do you REALLY care, fuck it, I will stick with paying 29$ for THAT operating system, instead of free as in beer or as in freedom ( countless hours of my time), or Windows ( 299$).
There is not a single "Open Source" operating system that can match OSX for 29$... period! Whoever says otherwise, has simply not used OSX.
And just in case you are wondering, I haven't used Microsoft products since 2005, and Linux since 2009, on the desktop. Suffice to say that today I am actually not messing with my operating system, I don't NEED to.
Knowing a bit of all 3 worlds, I would have paid the same respect to fucking Stallman as I would Jobs, or Gates for that matter. Their influences are just as important. The difference between them lie in the respect they are capable of showing to what the next guy did, that fact that someone doesn't agree is totaly shortsighted, near fanatical, which just makes that person a fucking IGNORANT.
When Stallman dies, I will come back and remind that ignorant of this post.
Jobs hat 2 abilities:
Designing nice computers.
And holding keynotes that suggested he invented computers.
I've heard a lot of stories about what it was like to actually work with Steve Jobs, and most of them were NOT pretty. (I've heard the same kind of things about Bill Gates for that matter). The stories go he was abusive and foul mouthed with his underlings when he wasn't pleased (like Trump on steroids). He was a marketing genius and I'm sure Apple will be hard pressed to find someone that will fill his shoes, but I'm willing to bet quite a few of the Apple gang that had to put up with him are glad not to have to anymore.
I don't understand how criticizing a highly vocal opponent of free software disqualifies him to be the voice of free software.
I convinced that the people who like Jobs, are the same Obama voters. They sell their souls for an iphone, because it's "cool" just like voting for Obama. An iphone does what? Makes you poor, and sometimes makes a phone call. Voting for Obama makes you poor, and makes all of us poor. But please don't bother these people with trivialities. I have people who tell me that an iphone can do things an android phone can't.. and I asked what, and of course, no answer. These are the same people that told me that an ipod can do things other mp3 players can't. And an ipad can do things others can't etc.. They all just eat the marketing cupcakes and drink the marketing koolaid. I'm not glad that he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone.
This has been said before in this thread, but here is is a great quote:
Georges Bernard Shaw, "man and superman", 1903.
This applies to both Jobs and Stallman. We can all learn from both.
Richard who?
Damn you Apple/GNU fan boys. This is worse than Vi/Emacs.
assignment != equality != identity
This is not a story about Steve Jobs being evil or Richard Stallman being "right"
Richard Stallman, for all the good work he does, damages his movement by belittling people. And to do this when people
are mourning Steve Jobs, is classless. Mourning is NOT for the deceased, it is for the bereaved. It is a healing process. To come out
on this occasion to belittle Steve Jobs, is ineffective and just not nice.
If Richard Stallman wants his movement to succeed, he should be a little more classy.
And no, being right doesn't entitle you to be a jerk. What he did was wrong and not amount of "good programming" can excuse this sort of behavior
And several people have said that Steve Jobs (and bill gates) can be "hard" to work for.
A friend of mine that worked with Richard Stallman, said he was a petulant child.
He may be right, but that doesn't excuse his behavior.
Other people are right too, and they don't insult me while they are teaching me.
We all know that the Apple walled garden has many deleterious effects and quite possibly will have many more in the future. This is not a surprise as as much has been said by many people here and elsewhere, not just or even primarily Richard Stallman. Yes, Steve Jobs and company had bad as well as good effects on personal computing. Does anyone really deny this?
To the proprietary game vendors you ARE a magpie with a wallet, but that is your choice. They aim their powerful marketing cannons and blast away. Consumers just eat it up and pay pay pay only to find that whatever they buy becomes obsolete in fairly short order. Repeat cycle over and over again. You play "their game".
Well perhaps you should just stop playing "their game". If you have a decent computer, then download/get a copy of BZFlag and go with that. It is a great game and is totally free to install and use. You can even design your own boards for it if you want to. BZFlag is free as in GPL and costs nothing to obtain and use and it is loads of fun. It beats any proprietary game out there.
Finally someone is not afraid to speak the truth.
I agree with you 100%. I love Free Software too.
The smartphone and tablet markets were essentially non-existent until iOS came along. Whatever success Android devices ultimately enjoy will be because Apple created both markets - and Android followed.
Go ask Nokia (smartphones) and Ballmer (tablets) what the market for those devices wee before iOS showed up.
Android fanboys should get on their knees and thanks Jobs that he made the mass production of those devices possible.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
You clearly don't actually listen to what rms says. He doesn't hate people that use proprietary software, he usually tries to educate them on its evils, of which there are plenty. And he doesn't want everyone to use free software other than the fact that he wants all software to be free software. Photoshop, Windows, etc. Those could all be licensed under the GPL today (probably not) and they would be right in Stallman's eyes. Why not? They respect user freedom, and they would have the functionality that everyone wants. He only wants the developer to respect user freedoms. He doesn't care to force users to do anything.
"Apple is widely-held stock, and its owners include pension funds and individual stockholders like myself.
Nice weasley phrasing there. Yes, "normal" people do hold some stock. But guess what proportion of the value of stocks is concentrated in what proportion of society.""
70% of Americans own stock directly or through some retirement fund.
I don't understand people who bitch about their jobs and being "wage slaves," then hate on those who find a way to make money outside of a paycheck
That is quite literally the most stupid argument I've ever heard. I guess you can't understand people who criticize bank robbers, either?
Your reply is totally incomprehensible. So, lawfully investing in a publicly held and regulated company is analogous to a bank robber? I think you need to re-read what you wrote out loud so you can literally hear the stupidest argument ever. Now, go back to being a wage slave and grumbling about greedy corporations. Apple is up $15 today, and I have to go count my ill-gotten gains.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
For all those who say Jobs wasn't the innovator, just the marketing Svengali, Woz sat in front of some HP execs with his early Apple PC and they looked at him like he shit on their desk. Woz wanted to give the things away to his geek buddies. Instead, he's worth hundreds of millions.
Jump ahead to PARC and their GUI. Same thing, Xerox had no vision.
Jump ahead to Apple in the mid-90's. Jony Ive sat at his desk, largely ignored. Jobs returned to Apple and immediately recognized Ive as a design genius and promoted and utilized him.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Xerox was paid millions in Apple stock for sharing their IP with Apple. But wait, I thought you open-sourcers didn't believe you could "steal" ideas?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
How many you got?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Steve Jobs was not an inventor, an engineer, an innovator, or any of these outlandish labels being applied to him
How many patents do you hold?
Steve Jobs was a business man. A man who spent his life making, largely, second-class products.
That's funny, for such shoddy products, Apple leads every year in customer satisfaction. Meanwhile, my Dell laptop and my GF's HP laptop are PoS paperweights. I've got a 20-year-old Mac that still boots and works great.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
You having a right to say something doesn't mean I can't call you out as a total asshole for saying it.
"The law often allows what honor forbids." -- Bernard-Joseph Saurin.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
When he showed them the early Apple PC prototype? A visionary sees what other people don't.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
"Steve Wozniak designed the Apple 1 while he was employed at HP".
And he showed them the early Apple I and they looked at him like he'd shit on their desk. No vision whatsoever. Just like Xerox ignoring PARC employees. Or a Jobs-less Apple in the mid-90's ignoring Jony Ive's genius.
HP is currently the #1 computer manufacturer in the world.
Who just announced they are getting out of the PC business.
Learn your history and current events. Other than that, lots of information in your brain.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Jobs created the PC market in the late 70's (Woz wanted to give them away), then created a market to put one in every person's pocket (smartphones, another non-existent market before the iPhone, and no, Nokia doesn't count), then told everyone, "hey, the PC is dead, now we're using tablets," and everyone - including Android - dutifully followed.
So yeah, I'm calling Jobs the "most influential" if the metric is how many people and markets he influenced.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Nokia's smartphones and Microsoft's tablets were just flying off the shelves, then iOS came along?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I'm not arguing that Jobs "invented" the mouse, or the PC, or the GUI, or the media player, or the tablet. I'm not saying that his business practices weren't dickish, possibly monopolistic and against all the merits of freedom in software we here hold so dear.
But that's kind of like saying Edison didn't invent electricity - he just had the vision to understand how electricity could be brought to the masses and used by everyone to make their lives better. A million people and companies used his ideas and technology, but before him it didn't happen. Henry Ford didn't invent the car - but he brought it to the masses and made it a way-of-life. Not to say that there aren't other and better car companies.
Same thing with Jobs. Someone else invented the Mouse and GUI, and the media player, etc. Jobs saw the vision for the implementation, the packaging, the aesthetic, and how to bring it into the world. This was the important part.
I spent the first 30 years of my life believing that Wozniak was the "real genius" behind it all. After all, he was "the engineer" - "the designer". He "did all the work". But no, there are a million engineers that can execute a plan like that (granted, Woz *IS REALLY GOOD* at the low-level digital stuff). It's just like saying there were workstations with mice and GUIs before Jobs. and MP3 players before Jobs. And music retailers before Jobs. and PDAs and Smartphones before Jobs.
He brought a design, and aesthetic, and a standard to the world. And unless you're reading this message from a text terminal or teletype machine, your working with stuff that was heavily inspired by his vision, whether it has an Apple logo on it or not.
You don't need to be a programmer to program a computer. My boss isn't a programmer, yet he can program a computer simply by paying me money and telling me what to do. My mum isn't a programmer, but she can program a computer by asking me a favour. Stallman assumes people realise that.
There right there. Even fewer people want to ask/pay other people to program their computers for them. People want to buy a product that does what it says on the tin, maybe a bit more, but no less. They are happy for Apple (or whatever other company) to provide new features in an update, preferably for free, as in beer. The flexibility of free software is mostly useful to corporations, who have deep enough pockets to pay for modifications to the software they use, and to software geeks, who find coding enojyable. For everyone else, the flexibility is not even worth the cost, and is probably lowest on their list of needs.
So your assertion that you don't need to be a progammer is completely true, but also completely besides the point.
Sometimes an asshole is just an asshole. Richard Stallman is an asshole.
In the last paragraph of his rant on Read Write Web Joe Brockmeier says the same thing about Stallman that he rants against Stallman for writing about Jobs.
Brockmeier only changes the word "gone", used by Stallman (and Harold Washington) to "retire" and uses the word "gone" as a euphemism for Stallman's (and Washington's) "dead". Brockmeier does not want Stallman "dead", but only "gone", as Stallman would rather Jobs be not "gone", but is glad he is "retired" from the computer-world scene.
Hysterical outrage and critical thinking were mutually exclusive even before the computer, so this is not new.
You don't need to be a programmer to program a computer. My boss isn't a programmer, yet he can program a computer simply by paying me money and telling me what to do. My mum isn't a programmer, but she can program a computer by asking me a favour. Stallman assumes people realise that.
And I, despite having a Y chromosome, can give birth to a baby by paying a surrogate mother. :-)
A better way to state the point in question is "...a world where every user can have their device reprogrammed at will" (whether they're the ones who actually do the reprogramming or not - most probably won't).
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I'm appalled, but not surprised. There are two possibilities here. Either Stallman is so socially incompetent that he does not realize how profoundly offense his comments are, on so many levels, and he has nobody to inform him how to be considerate and gracious towards others; or, he is aware of the offensiveness of his remarks, and does not give a damn about how petty, childish, trite, and irresponsible they show him to be, as he pisses away his opportunity of a lifetime to win support and positive regard for his movement.
Either possibility - the clueless lack of empathy, or the intentional hostility towards those who do not think identically to him - disqualifies him as legitimate moral leader of anything, let alone a revolution to change the world into following his ethical high ground.
I've been sympathetic to his cause for decades, but I've now had it with him. I would now no longer even be willing to join his parade to honor the local dogcatcher.
Some might say, if you criticize, let's see you do better. All right. Here is the statement Stallman should have made, as official position of the EFF. I retain copyright to this statement, and explicitly forbid any use of my words to benefit the EFF.
What Stallman should have said:
Steve Jobs died at an age while many expect, and receive, further decades of opportunity to make their mark on the world. Let us share our sympathy with his family, friends, and colleagues, as they mourn someone close and dear to them. Despite his life being cut short early by tragic illness, Steve made a mark on the world that has profoundly affected and inspired millions, whether or not they are in the computer technology field. He combined his own ideas with many of the best, most original, creative ideas, discoveries and inventions of many others, starting with Steve Wozniak in the 1970's and continuing through to leadership of what became the world's highest-valued company.
Because he passionately felt certain about his visions, Jobs was relentless and sometimes confrontational in driving himself and others towards their fulfillment. As a consequence, many technological developments were commercialized, brought to market, and promoted in a way that appealed to millions of customers worldwide.
The original successes of Apple Computer were based on marvelous wonders of technical efficiency that were just starting to become widely known and widely affordable: more highly integrated computer chips, and more user-friendly software. Wozniak combined these in an ingenious way to make a little machine that delighted the Homebrew Computer Club. Woz continued these developments with a machine more accessible to the masses, the Apple II, complete with its own self-contained keyboard, case, power supply, and programming language.
A major part of this machine's success was that both hardware and software were completely documented and customizable. Hardware was available for others to customize through building accessory hardware that plugged into the open slots of the machine, without any need to pay a royalty fee, work around a patent, or send a portion of the revenue to Apple after signing a non-disclosure agreement. Software was also available to be understood and built upon. Hardware schematics and source code were both published as part of the standard package of manuals that came with the initial generations of the Apple II.
Jobs had the opportunity to learn about leading research being done in a large corporate setting, at Xerox, where many ingenious, visionary, inventive people integrated existing research ideas from industry and from higher education research into computers. The Xerox team then went beyond these past ideas to new concepts about how computers could be user friendly, fun, interactive, collaborative, and understandable.
A key ingredient of the Xerox research was complete publication of the source code, accessible to any user to read and modify and extend. In this way, the Xerox researchers worked wit
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Stallman deserves to be in Hell right the f**k now!
He has actively pushed to steal the good name of Linux so his misbegotten Recursive Bullshit Acronym will not be forgotten. They are just tools. Not great tools but free tools. Free is fine but Stallman is a low level scum sucking hack that has gotten way more attention then he has ever deserved. He is a horrible coder. Have you read his code? I have and it has always been horrid.
The basic concept of FOSS is great and I completely agree with it.
The basic fact of Stallman is he is an evil little troll that thinks that the world that it not 100% Stallman is evil.
King of the bullshit is what he is.
The thing that irritates me is all of this nonsense about him being a great "American innovator." Hasn't it been more than a decade since he built ANYTHING in America? He was a great innovator of Chinese products.
Peace, K1
You know what rhymes with Steve Jobs? Thomas Edison...
Nobody bought one of those to surf the Web or use apps.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
1158 comments in 13 hours. All on a story about a crabby old whiner whining about a popular, dead egomaniac. Is that all we have to talk about? Geeeeez, come on slashdot. There ARE things that matter still going on you know, even though your god of all technology has passed on. We can do better than this discussion, can't we? Apple has not died with its visionary/task-master/sideshow, and Stallman is still kind of a turd.
P.S. Just because you bought 4 different devices to do mostly the same things doesn't mean you knew Steve Jobs as a personal friend. And maybe you should look into the conditions in which Jobs' company employed foactory workers (via Foxconn), and all of their suicides. And cheaper competing devices with equivalent functionality.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Stallman wrote: "Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died."
Stallman wouldn't know freedom if someone gave him a buckshot of it in the ass. He belongs soliciting on Craigslist where trying to get something for nothing is the M.O. "Entitled" twit.
Mmmm, circumspice...
Not at all, unless you are talking about a version of AGPL.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Who is this Richard Stallman guy anyway?
Oh wait, I know -- he's a guy that's going to be missed by exactly 5 people. Did he change the world? Maybe the world of that 5 people.
He's just a jealous a-hole.
The guy who enabled NeXT to get on with writing an OS instead of wasting time on writing their Objective-C compiler from scratch. So no one you'd care about.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
...I'll eulogize him with much higher praise than the tepid effort I put forth for the benefit of my iFriends when they speak of the late Mr. Jobs.
Here's proof:
http://www.thedailyoutrage.com/outrages/2011/10/10/life-changers.html
1a Just get the pron directly. Site, torrent, USB, CIFS/NFS share, whaterver.
There are no other steps.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Stallman's idea of computing is to cater to the programmer. That will always gain the most sympathy on /.
Jobs's idea of computing was to cater to the end user. That will always gain the most sympathy with the 99% of the world that isn't on /.
He showed up to a wake and badmouthed the deceased in a spineless manner.
Now all ya all are barking about it.
Pay your respects or GTFO.
Same to you Mr. Stallman.
Before reading any replies, I'm betting to myself that Stallman is compared directly with Hitler before Jobs.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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objective reality says steve jobs and apple make good products, because fact: people *choose* to buy them!
now, people like stallman can go into denial about that, slag off steve jobs, fail to analyse the success of apple, fail to acknowledge that there might be some deeper intelligence driving apple's customers purchase decisions
or it could say - what can we learn from this?
i've had linux on my desktop since the 90's, i have noticed how in that time it has never gone mainstream. why?
stallman is, in my opinion, part of a dying worldview. he thinks people buy specifications, want swiss-army knives of technology with "more" = "better"
i think there is a new worldview appearing right now (based on something called Integral thinking) which puts human meaning-making at the centre of the system and uses technology to create a "space" which will provide human experiences and empowerment that people will pay for. i think apple is one of the few tech companies awake to this worldivew. in my opinion, this worldview is about to make an impact of the scale the rational worldview did in the age of the enlightenment.
this new way of looking at things turns the old worldview inside out, instead of putting a beige box specification at the centre of the equation, it puts a living breathing human being at the centre of the equation. as a worldview, it's more productive, more fulfilling, more empowering. and yes - people want it, lust after it, pay money for it, radical and powerful newness has that effect on humans, evolution is sexy and irresistible.
i'd love to see linux sail into a radical new future! yes there are problems with what apple are doing but it's totally facile just to dismiss the human enthusiasm that emerges around their products and around steve job's work.
inside that human passion there is a voice, and as apple's bottom line demonstrates, there are rational reasons to pay attention to it's message.
Apple is the the master at herding sheep. They have a way of making people believe they invented everything cool. They are like Coors Light, people are willing to pay a premium price for a not so good beer, because its the "cool" beer. They even convinced the government to attack MicroSoft for being a monopoly because they had no competitors, as they were running ads like the Mac vs PC guys. None of their products are new inventions, they are masters at taking what exists, making it work better, and convincing people that its the "coolest".
Am I the only one who thinks the world needs Stallman, Jobs, Gates, and the rest? We cannot afford to survive with technologies from one or the other and not all of them. Jobs has been great in harnessing economic value through his acute social sense of technology. Stallman continues to do the same in the legal field, again through his acute social sense of technology. Every IT invention has created new innovation in many other fields. For example, every editor aspires to becoming like Emacs. Every music seller aspires to iTunes. These would not be possible if Jobs and Stallman did not invent and impose their visions. If we cannot agree on what it means to "invent" and to "impose", at least let's agree on "accomplish". Both are accomplished. Jobs' appeal was to the aesthetic and Stallman's to freedom. The world needs more of both, and such visions are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes a walled garden might be the price to pay to bring an invention to life, but its not the end of the world although Stallman's concerns are valid, genuine, and rightful topics for debate in a free society.
The power of the Smalltalk-80 desktop is what we all are using today. Xerox failed completely. Steve was the one that got the GUI found on the it rolling. True The X-windows system was close second (what I use), and the true open source version. The Lisa followed by the Mac was way ahead of the game, long in advance of MS.
I did get a change to use the Tektronix version of the Smalltalk machine back in the day, but that was hardly a main stream device.
My Kudo's to Steve Jobs for that.
But at least DEC's round mouse had 3 prominent buttons that told your hand immediately what orientation it was in. So you only had to hold it to know you were holding it wrong. Apple's really was a puck, and you had to move it to know you were holding it wrong.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
How does shipping jobs to India, pressuring workers to make huge concessions in benefits even as you rake in record profits, and providing the shittiest products you get away with at the highest price you can get a way with "make society wealthy"? I'm not saying that Jobs has done these things, but that these are the exact sort of things done by your "ruthless capitalists".
Or maybe you're just trolling.
Just like Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Hidalgo, Bonaparte, Bolivar, de Gaulle and well, like what has been claimed by almost every political leader in human history.
Stallman is far more a politician than a coder. He is the head of the Free -as in Freedom- Software Fundation. Freedom is a political term. I doubt that Stallman devotes more than 2% of his time to code, but I'm pretty sure that he devotes most of his time to promote his political views. Now, try in a democracy to tell the people that everyone that doesn't agree with you is a fool and see how well you will do in the polls.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
He can work in the FSF as VP of travel and evangelization. The President should be a new person. Someone fresh and young, with vision.
Using the hate as a way to force people to think like you is not good.
Also, a person with fresh memory will too. RMS forgot that the most used browser in mobile is webkit, an Apple product.
gcc -pedantic rms.c -o - > /dev/null
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
why is it that as soon as some one dies, all the evil is forgotten? steve jobs did some great things. steve jobs did some horrible things. just because he's dead doesn't mean he didn't do bad things. Glad someone had the balls to remind folks of the things he did.