Richard Stallman's Dissenting View of Steve Jobs 1452
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."
Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:2, Insightful)
I see you trollin'.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:2, Insightful)
It's interesting that persons promoting freedom want to restrict what other people do.
Because we'd clearly be most free, when there are absolutely no restrictions on what people do. For example, if you stop me from assaulting you, then I'm clearly not free at all am I?
Re:Thank god (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Amen [slashdot.org].
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.
The media, of course, is in love with walled gardens, and are in awe of Jobs' ability to sell them. It all makes total and complete sense.
Timing is everything, and RMS is a jackass (Score:0, Insightful)
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.
Again: not surprising (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh. Stalman only cares about "sustainable" freedom. Apple, and Jobs, were NO champions of that cause. We all know the very good things about Apple, but Stalman keeps in mind the BAD things, such as extreme vendor lock-in, anti-privacy instances, market lock-in (closed app-store, anyone), extreme censorship against FLOSS, hostile behavior towards other companies and hostile behavior towards competing products...
We are already screwed if people take Stalman as the corporate image of Linux. But that doesn't mean the guy is wrong.
Sounds fair. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not exactly fan of Apple, but Richard Stallman has no merits to basically say he's glad Steve Jobs is dead.
There is no merit (see what I did there? In case you didn't, I used the word correctly) to the assertion that someone who has said they are not glad someone is dead is glad that they are dead. I am not glad that Jobs died either, but I am glad he won't be at the helm of Apple Computer, Inc.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
Richard Stallman has no merits to basically say he's glad Steve Jobs is dead.
He didn't say that. He said, 'I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone.'
Linux geeks ... are happy to see people die.
He did not say that. He said, 'I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone.'
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.
Maybe you don't know what web site this is.
Ubuntu has tried to fix that with Linux, but it's still far from Mac OSX or even Windows. ... I'm not exactly fan of Apple
Again, I think you're not on the right web site, and you probably really are an Apple fan.
Dear Mr Stallman (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
This is the sort of thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thank god (Score:1, Insightful)
This, this, 1000 times this.
It drives me nuts when someone dies and suddenly everyone treats them like a saint.
Steve Jobs was an egotistical asshole in life, and I'm not going to start thinking differently just because he died.
Sorry to say it... (Score:5, Insightful)
... 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.
Ah yes, bring on the bad moderation. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Thank god (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
The idol worship over the death of THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MAN IN COMPUTING was quite embarrassing, but the comment from RMS outdid that easily. He could have explained his views in a more polite manner, but he chose not to.
Stallman should remember that he isn't just any random character fighting for software freedom. He's the self-appointed publicity figure for open source movement, and in a case like this, it does not only matter what he thinks or what the members of FSF think. Rather, it's what other people unaffiliated with open source movement think.
The end result here being that most people now percieve Stallman as a bully who would be quick to slander the dead, and those who despise open source will have a easy straw man to attack.
Re:Sounds fair. (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you all forgetting that the DRM on iTunes was there only at the request of the record companies, and that it was apple that gained enough leverage to force them to withdraw that policy on iTunes?
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
It's got nothing to do with anything except that the news media loves sensationalism. To that end, they'd like to turn every death into a tragedy.
It's not about hero-worship of Jobs. It's about the news echo-chamber, loving to hear themselves talk.
I'm with Stallman on this. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Stallman tells it like it is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stallman: Hypocrite (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:More to communicatio than being right (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only is there wisdom in knowing precisely what to say, there is also wisdom in knowing when not to say it.
The time to make the statement is while it is relevant. You wait until the initial storm dies down, and then you start your own. And it is critical that we receive this message — not you and I, maybe, but as many of the wide-eyed legions of Apple as can be reached. Because what Apple represents is precisely the same thing that Microsoft or Sony represents: a dearth of choice. Stallman might be an egotistical ass, but he is certainly the foremost champion of the rights of the user. Some programmers don't like that, so they don't like the GPL, and they don't like Free Software. They call it a virus and they would prefer to stamp it out rather than have to deal with something so confusing.
Other people can make the same point in a month, and a year, and reach other audiences, but this point needs to be made now and it needs to be made well. Stallman has done both.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:4, Insightful)
Stallman does, and always has, define freedom as that which most benefits him. He is or was a programmer and he demands the freedom to program and modify the software and devices he uses. Which is great for him.
But how can the freedom to choose not include the freedom for people to choose an Apple style 'walled garden'? I am absolutely certain that Stallman doesn't know what I want better than I do.
Further, if you don't buy any Apple products, how can you be effected by Apple? Apart from your not being able to buy a tablet that apes an ipad in countries that don't allow products to ape one another. Also other than getting angry enough to click reply on every Apple/Jobs story.
Re:Ah yes, bring on the bad moderation. (Score:1, Insightful)
Why does someone have to be a shill to disagree with you?
I find that these days, the label "shill" is being used in the same way a lot of other terms, such as "anti-semetic" is used - to silence the person that label is being applied to, because there is no argument against it once the label has been applied.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
There's plenty of other ways to get your news.
Exactly. Get your news like this great story, Apple User Acting Like His Dad Just Died [theonion.com] from The Onion, America's Finest News Source.
What's the difference between The Onion and mainstream media? Everyone at The Onion knows their product is 100% fictional.
Fair and Balanced (Score:5, Insightful)
Richard Stallman is unfortunate (Score:4, Insightful)
Richard Stallman is unfortunate. Being correct but not politically correct is a tough equation.
Reality Check, RMS (Score:3, Insightful)
We idolize the dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
fsck steve jobs (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:Timing is everything, and RMS is a jackass (Score:2, Insightful)
Dammit! I have no mod points!
Indeed. "People want their computers to just work".
RMS and all the other Open Sores fanatics:
YOU are NOT the target audience for the iPod/iPad/iPhone.
YOU have NEVER been the target audience for the iPod/iPad/iPhone.
YOU WILL NEVER BE the target audience for the iPod/iPad/iPhone.
The majority of Apple users don't care a fat rat's ass about RMS, Open Sores, Linux, Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. They don't care that the POS Chinese plastic digital music player you bought from Hong Kong via eBay plays Ogg Vorbis files. They don't care that it shows up as a USB storage device.
What they care about is this:
One click, music is paid for, it's on the computer and in their iDevice. Seamlessly, problem free.
They care about the same experience when adding an app to their iPhone. They care that when they drop the iPhone into the cradle at night, everything syncs automatically.
They do not care what that hairy buffoon in Cambridge thinks. If the App Store's "Walled Garden" helps to keep malicious software off their iPhone, they see that as a GOOD thing.
They do not lament that they cannot run FOO.EXE on their iPhone, much in the same way that I do not lament that I cannot get DOOM to run on my microwave oven, nor Angry Birds to run on my old landline desk telephone.
Finally, they do not care about YOU or your opinions. And that, in the end, is what really pisses you all off. For all your posturing and bleating and chest thumping, you are ignored by the very people you deride as fanboys and mindless followers.
Funny how that works.
Re:Thank god (Score:4, Insightful)
Buddhism is the only religion that can be taken seriously and isn't about judging and killing other people in the name of some imaginary person
You need to take a stroll around the mall a couple more times. There are plenty of other such religions, some of them even popular. Not to knock Buddhism.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
But how can the freedom to choose not include the freedom for people to choose an Apple style 'walled garden'?
Some "freedoms" which involve the sacrifice of a particular freedom are not permitted. For example, you are not allowed to sell yourself into slavery. Whether you think that walled gardens are heinous enough to merit such disapproval or not is a personal thing. Many persons considered slavery to be quite acceptable - for others.
Further, if you don't buy any Apple products, how can you be effected by Apple?
In much the same way as properly paid workers are affected by a slave labor force. Some occupations are thus priced out of the market, as they can't compete with subsistence-level workers (there would be openings in other occupations, such as slave driver). Becoming locked into a walled garden is generally a one-way trip, so the walled garden tends to expand to the detriment of the open market. You appear to think that this is harmless; it is not, largely due to the degree of control and squelching of competition that occurs in Apple's walled garden.
Better of? Maybe? We shall see. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
Shockingly enough, he isn't a big fan of the man who built what is perhaps the most powerful walled-garden presently in operation... I don't understand why that is a surprise...
Re:Ah yes, bring on the bad moderation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does someone have to be a shill to disagree with you?
Because moderating 'flamebait' isn't a form of disagreement.
Your post was good example of a civil way to disagree. Abusing one's moderation power to cover up someone's opinion on the other hand is an act of violence, which generally happens when someone has an agenda to push. Hence you get accusations of being a shill or a fanboi.
drinkypoo was at worst answering an act of silencing in-kind, and even that sort of accusation seems too harsh.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:3, Insightful)
You tell a kid whose parent died that you're not glad the parent is dead, but you're glad they're gone. See how well that works for you.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Attempt to view porn on iPhone app
Two methods:
1a. open mobile browser
1b. surf to pr0n page
--or--
1a. import favorite pr0n flicks into iTunes via one of dozens of video codec convertors
1b. view pr0n movie on iPhone
This isn't exactly rocket science, and amazingly, aside from the "import to iTunes" step, is exactly like any other phone on the planet.
Or are you just mad that you can't buy T&A in their store?
(...who the hell actually pays for the stuff these days anyway?)
-sent from my crappy Blackberry curve.
Re:Stallman is out of line (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Dear Mr Stallman (Score:5, Insightful)
With which, other than the last, do you have a problem? And with the last point, do you honestly disagree? Or do you just think that people shouldn't speak honestly about the faults of a man after his death?
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:2, Insightful)
If i think somebody is a complete tosser and Ive made my views public when asked should I change my stance when asked directly and make a liar of myself just because they are dead?
if your not going to like what you know I will say dont ask and I wont say.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
That seriously improves his image a lot...
...but not so much if you recall other aspects such as his denial of paternity of a daughter (with Chrisann Brennan), claiming he was sterile, then going on to father three more sprogs with someone else. Creepy. :-|
Comment by S. LeBeau Kpadenou (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ah yes, bring on the bad moderation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does someone have to be a shill to disagree with you?
Disagreeing with someone is not sufficient reason for negative moderation.
Flamebait means "something I know will lead only to a flamewar", but I think that this is something that both merits discussion, and which can lead to productive discussion. I jotted off my little journal entry on the subject, which was indeed dramatically more rude and to the point, before I saw this article, so for me it was simply RMS saying what I wanted said. And I post a short comment that agrees with him and explains why? That is not flamebait. Nor is it a troll. Modding it "overrated" is just a copout. I think that moderation is actually one of the worst things about Slashdot, along with underrated. Well no shit, if you're moderating it obviously you want the rating to change. Thanks.
There is a clear argument against the term "shill", which is to stand up and say "I am not receiving compensation for my moderation of your comment." Granted, Slashdot does not make it possible to do this other than by posting in the story, but that also provides instant proof that this person engaged in the moderation, and gives them a chance to make their case as to why you should have been moderated in that fashion. If it is compelling, surely someone else will come along... and moderate the comment that they didn't like as overrated.
However, there are zero valid reasons to moderate my above comment as Flamebait. There are lots of reasons why someone might do it anyway. One of them is that they are a true iFanboy zealot who cannot bear any criticism of the holy Jobs, his turtleneck, or the RDF. (Thank goodness Guy Kawasaki made it okay to talk about the RDF, or shiny-suited agents of Apple might be knocking at my door right now, and I haven't even clicked Preview yet. Or perhaps they're simply RMS-haters and anything that agrees with him is evil. Regardless, the only other really good reason for such moderation is if you're getting paid to do it.
I try to restrict my use of the word "shill" to people who repeat the party line even when it has conclusively been proven to be false and/or irrelevant. Abusive moderation to hide a comment that diverges from the groupthink falls under aggressive maintenance of the status quo.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never been able to understand why these periodic "Stallman says something many people don't like" stories always involve so much strawmanning and apparent confusion.
I see that as beyond obvious, if not necessarily simple: Stallman is the head of a "dangerous" (read: influential) movement which confronts people's sensibilities and challenges the status quo. A lot of people have significant personal and economic investments which are threatened by the movement that Stallman represents, and as its figurehead he must be discredited or his words must be considered and both financial empires and carefully crafted illusions designed to permit ongoing behavior harmful to society and self will disintegrate.
Shockingly enough, he isn't a big fan of the man who built what is perhaps the most powerful walled-garden presently in operation... I don't understand why that is a surprise...
Yeah, it's almost like he's interested in Software Freedom or something.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:2, Insightful)
import favorite pr0n flicks into iTunes
Why do people think this shit is acceptable?
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're missing the point. RMS is about free software and has defined the fundamental software liberties [gnu.org] already. Software made by Apple and that kept in its walled garden does not match those liberties. The values pushed by Apple don't even come close.
Let's not delude ourselves. As far as software is concerned, with some notable exceptions, Apple always took the hard proprietary line in order to protect and add value to their hardware. It's natural for RMS to point it out. Especially at this moment in time, in a controversial manner, because well, that's what he does.
And hell, if anybody is to talk dirt about Jobs, let it be RMS, a man every bit as influential, who has fundamentally changed things and who has his place reserved in history books as well.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:3, Insightful)
Becoming locked into a walled garden is generally a one-way trip, so the walled garden tends to expand to the detriment of the open market.
No, I have an Apple phone and an Apple laptop, my servers run BSD. I have a DVR that runs Linux. The day a non-Apple phone or laptop, or non BSD server OS, or non-Linux running DVR, becomes available that suits my needs better than what I have, I'll use them instead.
Tell me specifically how the degree of control and squelching of competition specific to Apple's walled garden affects things outside the walled garden. Tell me about something with enough scale to justify you being able to deny my freedom to choose Apple.
Who the hell do you think owns corporations? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:3, Insightful)
The funny thing is, though, that Steve Jobs is not a parent to anyone here. He is a complete stranger, but has been elevated to such a messiah like stature that people that didn't even know him outside of his press releases literally went out of their way to buy fucking flowers and leave them at the Apple Store.
I think the lack of perspective most of these mourners display is the most discouraging thing. I read a few "Man, that sucks" comments and didn't have a problem, but when people call him the most important man of our time I get a little incredulous. The man made consumer goods for crying out loud, and what did he pioneer? Devices that look nice? It's bad enough when people say idiotic things like "Steve Jobs invented the personal computer/tablet/pda/smartphone/internet/{insert any modern convenience here}" but now that he's gone people are actually comparing him to Edison or Tesla in their grief. It's embarrassing to those of us with a brain.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:4, Insightful)
The big difference is that Apple is a private entity and is controlling what can and can't be sold via a store that they own. They do not control what you can buy in other stores, as would a government.
If you dislike what is available in Apple's store or you have some philosophical disagreement with the way they do things, you are free to buy some other device.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
But the issue Stallman is raising is that over many years, Jobs was about ownership and money as much as he was about anything else. He was not a leading light of the open source software movement. In fact, he and his company continue to be rather aggressively proprietary anywhere they can get away with it. They only moved to a Unix base because not to do so was fatal -- they didn't have a chance of developing a creditable non-Unix multitasking multiuser operating system to replace the long series of completely proprietary Mac OS's, at a time that even Microsoft was reading the writing on the wall (and MS had NT, for better or worse, and it took most of a decade to develop that to where it was capable of turning into e.g. XP and giving MS a consumer OS that wasn't doomed out of the gate.
Basically, the OSS community saved Apple's ass every bit as much as the Ipod did -- without OSX the actual Apple "computer" was dead and everybody knows it and knew it at the time (and Apple came within a hair of ceasing to exist because of it). So what, exactly, did Apple then do for the OSS community? Move to open standards for (say) music? Move to open standards for anything at all where the standards were not already dictated by the marketplace? Become an aggressive corporate presence calling for an end to proprietary software and hardware?
Hardly. Does the Ipod use a USB port to play music or charge? It does! Does it use a standard USB connector? It does not! Hence an instant, enormous aftermarket for a proprietary piece of cabling that won't work with anybody else's anything and that gains no particular benefit from the difference. Over decades -- printer cables, modem cables, mouse cable -- if it was Apple only Apple's version would fit on an Apple piece of hardware.
Software no better. I personally am neither glad he's dead nor glad he's gone because either OSS can make it on its own in spite of people like Jobs and Gates and companies like Apple and Microsoft or it can't, but Jobs was in a position to do the compassionate and ethical thing at least a time or two in there and I would not say that his corporate business decisions properly reflected the general Buddhist philosophy or ethos.
It was, and remains, all about the money and power and influence every bit as much as it was about the joy.
rgb
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. I'm glad the FSF has someone as uncompromising as Stallman. Even if his perceived extremism is bad for corporate open source software, it's better for the free software to survive in its current state as a hobbyist movement than to devolve into openwashing and flourish, which is exactly what corporations want, to turn OSS into nothing more than a nifty marketing label while they control the product with an iron fist. This is why I support the GPLv3 and am against any "pragmatist" ideas of allowing for Tivoization and patent traps so that companies will be more likely to adopt and use open source.
Android is a good example of what happens to open source software when corporations get their way with it. It flourishes, but so what? Who benefits from the openness, apart from the few geeks who download the source code (for certain versions) and hack it onto a few devices? To the average customer it's as closed as iOS for all practical purposes. At the end of the day, this situation is at best, no better than the stereotypical obscure neckbeard-run FOSS project critics fear the "idealist" position would lead to in terms of openness, except that a company got rich by ripping off the open source community and contributing a little code back for the uber-geeks to tinker with. And it's a good thing there are a few tablets and phones out there with unlocked bootloaders and VMs are an option or the hobbyist wouldn't be able to do a damn thing with the Android source. If Google really wanted to tivo-lock Android, nothing's stopping them.
Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Great no-hype article on techdirt about Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry but patenting rounded corners, then suing suing Samsung is certainly a scam. And Apple has been doing that sort of thing for decades.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:4, Insightful)
But how can the freedom to choose not include the freedom for people to choose an Apple style 'walled garden'? I am absolutely certain that Stallman doesn't know what I want better than I do.
I don't believe Stallman would dispute your freedom to make that choice.
He would just regret that you have done so.
He would also contend that most people sleepwalk into that choice without knowing the ins and outs of the factors.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
"Open source"? Funny that you should say that. Stallman promotes "free" software, not "open source".
Why's it funny, and what's the difference, I hear you ask? Well GNU/Linux (and Hurd, har har) is "free", aka viral. BDS is "open source", and that's exactly why Apple was able to bag it, build a wall around it, and make their own secret proprietary version without giving anything back to the community that built it.
Re:Thank god (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank you for your concern.
Funny thing: there are huge numbers of people like you, who are always ready to tell anyone who stands up for a cause that they are doing it wrong and would be far better off just sitting back down again and not rocking the boat. There are far fewer people like Stallman who are actually ready to do the standing up. Which do you think has a more beneficial effect on society?
To put it another way: without Stallman, I would be typing this on a computer that was bound by restrictive EULAs that would prevent me from knowing how it worked or modifying it to suit my needs. He clearly knows a thing or two about software freedom. What have you accomplished that gives you the authority to claim you know better than him how to achieve his goals?
(Also, I find it bizarre that you equate issuing a press release you don't like with throwing blood at people. Really, you're going with that? Wow.)
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish people didn't eat at McDonald's, or drink Starbucks coffee, but I prefer to live in a world where choices that seem suboptimal to me are possible for other people to make.
Mainly because I know the choice police would eventually get around to taking away something I like.
Re:Thank god (Score:2, Insightful)
And media basically runs on Apple, thanks to Mac bringing Photoshop, and equivalent tools for video and audio, to market.
There is so much wrong with that sentence.
The Knoll brothers along with Adobe brought Photoshop to market. Mac didn't bring anything. The Knoll brothers initially built it just for a Mac, but soon after for the PC.
Also, most all major audio/video/photo/compositing/3D/whatever other creative application is built for Mac and Windows (and yes, some even for Linux)
The only pro-tools that are Mac-exclusive are the ones made by Apple, and they appear to want to dumb those down out of the professional range of products lately (ie Final Cut Pro) if not entirely discontinue them (ie Shake).
How Mac got the notion that they were the choice system for creative work was really all just marketing. That it continues so is
You are hero worshiping too (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)
It is appropriate for RMS to point out the privacy/openness issues, but he really, really doesn't need to be so harsh to do it.
Read his words - he implies that anyone using any Apple product is a "fool" who has willingly stepped into a "jail." (Those are his specific word choices.) He has good points, but by being so polarizing, he is only pushing people further away from his own position. Rather than a few sentence rant, his time would have been better served by putting together a few thoughtful paragraphs that acknowledge the positive impacts from Steve Jobs (ie, his emphasis on usability) while pointing out the downsides (ie, software freedom, etc.).
A post like that might even cause others to think, rather than encouraging them to dismiss RMS as a crazy lunatic.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:4, Insightful)
The one trolling was Stallman. He was, , ""I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." [stallman.org]
So, a massive cerebral hemorrhage, a bullet to the head that left him a vegetable, a mental degenerate disease, or even something that just left him physically too debilitated to continue to do his, job, would have been fine with Stallman. Read the entirety of what he wrote, and you'll see that there's no other interpretation.
Stallman is no longer relevant, and his latest whining just underlines that.
Re:You are hero worshiping too (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thank god (Score:4, Insightful)
I think what we're seeing here is a dichotomy between technophiles like Slashdot users, and laypeople who use computers but don't understand how they work. To the open source technophile, being able to grab the source, fix a bug or add a feature, and compile it is a perk. To the lay person it's the same thing as telling them they have access to all the parts to build a rocket to go to the moon. They couldn't do it in a thousand years even if they tried, and so it's a nonexistent benefit to them - a non-feature.
Apple's allure to regular people, and Jobs' particular influence, is that they make all this complicated technology easy to use. Yeah they severely limit the tech geek in the process, but most regular people simply don't care. To them, the alternative is barely being able to use the technology at all. That's what makes Jobs one of the most important influences on technology in the minds of most laypeople (i.e. the great majority of the population).
I'm an engineer by trade and this is one of the things which confounds me about programmers ("software engineers"). One of the most basic tenets of engineering is KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid. Yet programmers, and especially the Linux culture, seem to delight in making things more complicated rather than simpler. They advocate Gentoo, and express shock and dismay that the "dumbed down" Ubuntu distro is the most popular. It's ok to revel in the bits and pieces that make technology work. But for the vast majority of people, the technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself -- a mere tool. Those bits and pieces need to be as invisible as possible so these people can use the tool to get their work done.
With Jobs' passing, end users lost one of their biggest advocates for this simplicity in an industry full of tech geeks who love to tinker with the nuts and bolts. That's why the mainstream media is going ga-ga over this while tech sites like Slashdot are yawning.
Re:Stallman who made Linux possible (Score:5, Insightful)
What planet are you from?
Stallman didn't make Linux possible, BSD did. Are you suggesting no other compilers or debuggers existed?
Stallman didn't make MacOS possible. Again, BSD did. Safari doesn't use any of Stallman's code, and if LGPL didn't exist (a license Stallman wasn't a fan of), another would have been used.
Stallman's contributions are gdb, hot air, and beard grease and the only reason gcc/gdb became popular is the same reason UNIX became popular: it was available. Apple doesn't even use gcc anymore and its days may be numbered.
Steve Jobs wanted to make a computer for everyone, Stallman couldn't give a damn how difficult they are to use so long they use his license.
HURD:0 Apple:Billions
The only reason you've been modded up is because of FSF zealots who have nothing better to do than troll slashdot. If people rated your post on the facts you would get a -5 flaimbait