Showing posts with label Steve Jobs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steve Jobs. Show all posts

Friday, October 21, 2011

Steve Jobs Thought He Owned Ideas

A biography of Steve Jobs will be out next week, and journalists with advance copies are punching out blog entries and news stories about some of the contents. In one newsworthy bit at Ars Technica, Ken Fisher reports that Steve Jobs said at a meeting with Eric Schmidt about Google's Android operating system for smart phones, "I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that's all I want."

Well, now, we'd all like for our competitors to stop using our ideas, and leave us with a monopoly. But I think that would leave Apple with problems of its own, because a lot of the ideas used in their devices have been used by others, and invented or conceived of by others, even though those ideas may not have appeared in a smart phone. It is highly unlikely that the iphone component ideas were not thought of by someone, somewhere else. So to be fair Apple would have to stop using most of the ideas embedded in the iPhone.

For example, I am reminded of the hand-held computers used by the characters in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's classic science fiction novel The Mote in God's Eye. If we were to use this principle of Job's, the their phone should be called the Niven-Pournelle phone, and Apple would be paying royalties.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Richard Stallman's War on Software Users

It can be argued that advocating GNU products is tantamount to advocating poor user interfaces. The adoption rate of open source software under the GPL license is very poor among new and novice computer users, as the primary focus on FSF-philosophy software has never been about user satisfaction. It has been about programmer satisfaction.

When this problem collides head-on with memories of one of the greatest user interface advocates on the planet, Steve Jobs, then it isn't surprising that Richard Stallman would have nothing good to say about his competitor. Aside from Richard Stallman's poor sportsmanship, juvenile thinking, and poor attitude towards Jobs, which has caught a lot of peoples' attention, what is really galling is that Richard Stallman expects all the rest of us to discard our "impure" commercial and not-so-free software and take up GNU products.

In short, Richard Stallman wants to be dictator, and Steve Jobs was in his way. No wonder he wrote what he did.


This business of wanting to be king of all software by poisoning the well for everyone else has been a Stallman agenda for a long time. I've often wondered if he would still be an advocate for free software if the world were to require that his name be removed from everything in the FSF and GNU projects, and from all past news articles, so that he got no credit for any GNU or GPL work. Considering the massive efforts by other developers, and lack of much useful software written by Stallman, if he were to erase himself from the history books it would be a recognition of true reality, which is that being an a##h### is not something that should result in credit. But then, Joseph Stalin is still famous for his small role in Soviet Russia, so I guess that sometimes a##h###s get their notoriety whether or not they deserve it.

I really really doubt that Stallman would be willing to give up his fame. After all, what he wants is to ruin all the other software developers financially, then claim most of the fame (a kind of payment, after all) for himself.

End users deserve good software, and sometimes the shortest path to that reality is commercial software that winds up being closed source. It may stick in Stallman's craw, but, hey, I'm willing to live with that.

(Oh, and Richard, that OS is called "Linux", not that other thing you claim but which is a prevarication.)

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Some of the articles posted about Stallman's disrespectful, parting dig at Jobs: