Re: Steven P. Jobs 1955-2011: Here's to the crazy one who inspired us all...

[David Chisnall]

Richard,

As the founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation, when you 
make comments like this in public, it reflects on all of us who contribute to 
these projects.  When you use the death of someone who made huge contributions 
to the industry (some negative, a lot positive) to score political points, then 
that reflects on the GNU project, the FSF, and all of us.  

I notice that you put iTunes in the same category as the App Store.  Perhaps 
you should recall that the iTunes Music Store was instrumental getting the 
entire music industry to abandon DRM.  I'd contrast this with your achievements 
with the Defective By Design campaign, and say that's a clear win by Steve Jobs 
on behalf of end user freedom.  

What else did Steve Jobs make cool?  I can think of a few things that 
immediately come to mind:

- Graphical user interfaces
- Object oriented programming
- Rapid Application Development
- Using computers!

All of these have enriched the Free Software world.  How many hackers in the 
80s learned to program on an Apple II?  How many in the '90s on a NeXT 
computer?  How many in the last decade on a Mac?  At FOSDEM, I lost count of 
the number of people who said to me something along the lines of 'Oh, you work 
on GNUstep?  I learned to program on NeXTSTEP'.  Many of these people moved on 
from Objective-C and are now working at companies like Red Hat, being paid full 
time to write Free Software.

During Steve Jobs time at Apple, the company released a lot of Free Software, 
including (off the top of my head - not an exclusive list) original authorship 
or significant contributions to:

- CUPS
- Launchd
- LLVM / Clang
- libdispatch
- libc++
- Darwin Streaming Server
- Darwin Calendar / Contacts Server
- WebKit

In fact, the C++11 stack that we are currently testing in FreeBSD was primarily 
written by Apple employees, on company time.  

I'm assuming when you talk about 'making jails cool', you're talking about the 
App Store.  I would certainly agree that denying users the right to run any 
software that they choose is a bad thing, but in Apple's product lines this 
kind of lock in is restricted to iOS devices, which currently have a declining 
market share.  The same model is also used by Android, which claims to be open 
but, to coin an OpenBSD slogan, is only open for business.  Perhaps your ire 
would be better directed there...

If you are actually talking about making proprietary software cool, I'd say 
that this honour probably goes to the author of the Open Letter to Hobbyists, a 
certain William Henry Gates III.

So, a summary of Steve Jobs achievements, good and bad:

- Ran a company that was responsible for a number of developments we take for 
granted in modern computer.

- Ran a company that released several million lines of Free Software and pushed 
open standards

- Forced the music industry to abandon DRM

- Sold proprietary software

- Sold a handheld computing environment so attractive to users that they didn't 
notice how locked down it was for the first couple of years

If you believe that the last two of these outweigh the first three, then that's 
your prerogative.  It's not a point of view that I would agree with, but I 
respect your right to hold this opinion.  I do not respect your choice to use 
his death as a political platform, and I believe that your tendency to ignore 
the good that individuals and companies do and focus entirely on their negative 
aspects is detrimental to the Free Software movement.  

Given the choice of releasing proprietary software and being ignored by you and 
releasing some Free Software and being harangued by you for keeping some 
proprietary, it's little wonder that we have difficulty persuading companies to 
open parts of their product lines.  If we are judging people's lives by a few 
actions, then I can think of several instances when you have caused serious 
harm to the public image of Free Software.  Perhaps you would like your 
obituary to focus entirely on these, and ignore your significant positive 
contributions.  

David

On 8 Oct 2011, at 09:50, Richard Stallman wrote:

>       So it is unfair of RMS to
>    characterize Steve as the "one who made jail cool." 
> 
> That is fair because that is the most important effect he had on the
> world.
> 
>                                                         Don't let one
>    bad thing tarnish a myriad of great things.
> 
> I don't think anyone here disagrees with that.
> 
> If Jobs did several things, the rational way to judge these things is
> separately.  Thus, the App Store does not make the NextSTEP design
> bad, and the NextSTEP design does not make the App Store good.
> 
> If the question is to judge Jobs, that requires adding them all up.  I
> conclude that his net effect was very negative, because the App Store
> and iTunes did tremendous harm.  However, when judging Jobs' legacy
> isn't the question, we don't need to add them up.  We can keep them
> separate.
> 
> In particular, there is no reason why criticism of Jobs should have
> any affect on anyone's opinions about GNUstep.  GNUstep is what it is,
> regardless of Jobs, Apple, or anyone else.


-- Sent from my brain