Notes on the Passing of Steve Jobs

A tribute to Steve Jobs is posted on xkcd ➤. The eternal flame at the memorial is in fact the Mac OS X spinning wait cursor ➤, better known as the spinning beach ball of death because it usually appears when an application (or, worse, the Finder) is caught in an infinite loop. Make of it what you will, but the caption for the cartoon reads, There's always the hope that if you sit and watch for long enough, the beachball will vanish and the thing it interrupted will return.

An opinion in the British IT news site The Register condemns the slushy eulogizing of Steve Jobs as distasteful and disrespectful, even to the point that nobody seemed to realize that Jobs was a sick man, had been for a long time, and was not long for this world. ➤

Some people just didn't like the Steve, and they still don't like him now that he is gone. ➤

Apple created closed systems, whether almost unprogrammable closed hardware (iPods, iPads) or stores where media and software had to conform to Apple's capricious specifications if it were to be made available in the stores (iTunes, App Store). Apple fully intended to do to the Internet what AOL and CompuServe in the 1990's failed to do: Create closed gardens when their denizens get a strictly regulated experience in exchange for a loss of their privacy and personal information. All this is the antithesis of freedom, both of speech and of software. This is why Richard Stallman is hostile to Steve Jobs. Here are Stallman's complete words about the Steve:

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.

I found Stallman's quote via some editor guy who dumped in his pants upon reading it. ➤ The Westborovians wrote worse about the Steve than Stallman; yet this guy cries out, like a baby with a soiled diaper, for Stallman's ouster as the leader of the Free Software Foundation.

No, it is never good when someone dies. I sure as hell have not quite recovered from the passing of Caitlin Clarke. However, we must get over the fact that people die — all the time — often in the most horrible ways — but their deaths do not change the opinions others hold about them. Stallman expressed his, as is his right. We do not have to listen to Stallman, as is our right. (Lots of people don't listen to Stallman, anyway, not even about software or the Internet, about which he has been compared to Grampa Simpson. ➤, at the bottom) And anyone, who bases an opinion of free/open-source software on any opinion of Stallman outside of his expertise, is an asshole.