10-29-2011, 06:39 AM
I recently read the book "Hackers" which discusses some of these issues, and in particular Jobs' words and actions regarding his personal belief system. It was the version from 1984, which was well berfore the Internet. I understand there are newer versions out now.
Steve Jobs (along with Bill Gates) both felt a very strong need to protect their work from what they perceived to be "harm" in the hands of others. These patterns were set up long before the big profits of the tech bubble began to roll in.
I have found that sometimes anger is born out of love in the sense that it is employed by those who feel it is necessary to act as the protector of others selves and/or ideals. There are many such as Jobs and Gates who feel that it is appropriate to employ "intellectual property rights" and "proprietary hardware" to restrict the actions of others.
Given this perspective, I can see how the persistent "disrespect" of the hackers toward their wishes could have resulted in great anger, and eventually manifested as cancer.
I can also see how, in the hacker mentality, information should be free and not "possessed" by others. To this mindset, a person's mind is not unlike a terminal attached to a mainframe, or as a single node in the Internet. It doesn't make much sense to talk about "my information" and "your information" because it flies in the face of spiritual reality.
In my opinion, Steve Jobs performed a great service by developing products that actually worked as they were intended, which is more than I can say for Gates and Microsoft. However- I am in favor of information sharing and choose to use open source software whenever possible. I made an attempt to run solely on Unix a few years back and it didn't work out so well. Maybe it is time to give it another attempt.
Steve Jobs (along with Bill Gates) both felt a very strong need to protect their work from what they perceived to be "harm" in the hands of others. These patterns were set up long before the big profits of the tech bubble began to roll in.
I have found that sometimes anger is born out of love in the sense that it is employed by those who feel it is necessary to act as the protector of others selves and/or ideals. There are many such as Jobs and Gates who feel that it is appropriate to employ "intellectual property rights" and "proprietary hardware" to restrict the actions of others.
Given this perspective, I can see how the persistent "disrespect" of the hackers toward their wishes could have resulted in great anger, and eventually manifested as cancer.
I can also see how, in the hacker mentality, information should be free and not "possessed" by others. To this mindset, a person's mind is not unlike a terminal attached to a mainframe, or as a single node in the Internet. It doesn't make much sense to talk about "my information" and "your information" because it flies in the face of spiritual reality.
In my opinion, Steve Jobs performed a great service by developing products that actually worked as they were intended, which is more than I can say for Gates and Microsoft. However- I am in favor of information sharing and choose to use open source software whenever possible. I made an attempt to run solely on Unix a few years back and it didn't work out so well. Maybe it is time to give it another attempt.