It is a fairly universal human practice ...
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| Author | Content |
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| 2briancox Oct 08, 2011 11:47 AM EDT |
to remember the good in people when they have passed. I agree that Steve Jobs did not do everything perfectly. Certainly, the questionable control that was forced on iOS users is an example of that. But the man did a lot of good. And he was brilliant. He did change the world and mostly that was for the better. And that is what 80%+ of the people in the world prefer to focus on when they remember a man who has lived a very real and thus naturally flawed life. |
| montezuma Oct 08, 2011 12:31 PM EDT |
Well right it is graceful to focus on someone's positive achievements but I think some of the praise has been a little hyperbolic. For example comparing him to Einstein like Michael Bloomberg did is really over the top. Jobs was the head of an extremely successful company. People do not get that far in the corporate world without some fairly ruthless anti-social behaviour. To pretend otherwise and to paint such folk as saints is delusional. |
| BernardSwiss Oct 08, 2011 12:55 PM EDT |
Yes, "candlelight vigils" (using iPhones, iPads, etc, as techno candles, yet) smacks more of cult religious adulation, rather than even a generous appreciation for his accomplishments. |
| 2briancox Oct 08, 2011 1:48 PM EDT |
I wasn't meaning to defend the nutty cultish fanbois out there. Only to explain why most people are "too polite". |
| Scott_Ruecker Oct 08, 2011 5:55 PM EDT |
I will say this much, I refused (for the most part) to post articles to the LXer newswire about his death because it had nothing to do with FOSS news. That was my choice as E-i-C, I didn't see it as relevant to our readers knowing that it would be all over the regular news anyway. One..or the dozen plus articles that were submitted us were not going to serve our audience and I stand by that decision. I have never had any beef with Steve Jobs personally. I may not like that he took a BSD kernel and made it proprietary, which is one of the major reasons Mac software is so solid now, but that is what the BSD license allows and he took advantage of it..because he could. I may not like it, but he didn't do anything 'wrong'. And whose to say that any of us wouldn't have made the same decision if we were in his place? I found the quote Stallman used distasteful and his comment about "..Jobs' malign influence on people's computing." inaccurate at best. He may not have been a supporter of FOSS, but in my mind he certainly was not an outright adversary like others we could name here. He was a technological innovator in many ways, and like Apple or not there is no denying that. Not being a supporter of Free and Open Source Software doesn't make you inherently evil, it just means your not as cool as you could be. ;-) I re-posted this to http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/32308/ and http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/32316/ |
| pogson Oct 08, 2011 8:03 PM EDT |
Scott Ruecker wrote, "Not being a supporter of Free and Open Source Software doesn't make you inherently evil, it just means your not as cool as you could be. " We are social beings. To share is good. To avoid sharing at all costs is evil. The BSD thing was good. Apple shared the BSD stuff with the world, according to the licence. Suing people who make rectangular shiny things is not just uncool, it is evil, claiming ownership of fundamental thoughts about utility that have been on the Earth for millenia. It is akin to theft, but on such a grand scale there should be a special place in Hell for that kind of selfishness. There is greatness. There is great good and great evil. Apple, under Steve Jobs committed many evil deeds and should be held in contempt by all decent people. It is how humanity polices itself, a social conscience. Other examples of Apple's evil nature are many: sweatshops in China, selling to the rich and ignoring the poor of the planet (perpetuating the digital divide), using the App Store as an anticompetitive tool, bullying rather than performing well and competing on price/performance, etc. There is plenty of evil in the world and Apple and Steve Jobs did a lot of it. |
| flufferbeer Oct 08, 2011 11:53 PM EDT |
+ 1 pogson Thanks for writing this; I think it just HAD to be said. And said sooner rather than later!! I'd guess that within the next week or so, we'll start to see all these starry-eyed praises of Jobs REALLY start to dramatically die down. Same for all those comments designed to deflect ANY possible criticism of him. But that's just my 2c. |
| kikinovak Oct 09, 2011 3:47 AM EDT |
I've been 100% GNU/Linux for the past ten years, and I don't own any Apple product. Next week I'll do a public talk about Linux, GNU and free software. This is the first time I'm no less than ashamed to adhere to the same movement as a bunch of bearded software Ayatollahs crawling out of their basements and eloquently claiming their moral right to piss on a grave. |
| hkwint Oct 09, 2011 10:07 AM EDT |
Well, what can be said is that as a CEO, Jobs did everything which the law allows for to help the AAPL-shareholders. Marketing genius, working in favour of the shareholders, his loyal fans and not caring too much about "society as a whole" or the rest. Of course, if AAPL-shareholders interests are against the interests of society as a whole one can blame the CEO, but in my opinion that's just the job of a CEO, "create shareholder value within the limits of the law". I think Steve Jobs excelled at it, and is probably the best marketing genius of 'my time'. It's a bit weird to blame a CEO for doing the things CEO's are paid to do, but enfin, RMS does. I think there's always friction between for-profit organizations solely representing the interests of the company and not society, and of 'ideological' organizations who are mostly about societal benefits, and not about profits. I guess in our world we need both. |
| jdixon Oct 09, 2011 12:30 PM EDT |
> I guess in our world we need both. Yep. |
| tuxchick Oct 09, 2011 12:52 PM EDT |
Jobs was just another by-the-book robber baron whose biggest success was fooling a lot of people into believing that he was special, somehow more spiritual and authentic. But he wasn't. Child labor, overseas sweatshops, bullying and abuse, pollution, insane intellectual property protection-- same old stuff prettied up a little. His main claim to greatness was fooling a lot of people all the time. |
| Grishnakh Oct 10, 2011 6:10 PM EDT |
montezuma wrote:For example comparing him to Einstein like Michael Bloomberg did is really over the top. That's really quite ridiculous. A better comparison is between Jobs and Thomas Edison. Both of them were better marketers than technologists, but I think Jobs actually did better than Edison did. Edison was largely a fraud, stealing credit for others' work, and also trying to kill AC power (and murdering some innocent elephants in the process) because he was too dumb to understand it. Why does Edison have a nice museum, while Tesla, who is singularly responsible for our entire society's use of electric power, has almost nothing? Jobs, while he was certainly no Tesla or Einstein, at least did a lot better than Edison, by recognizing and bringing to market important new changes in many things both in computing (esp. mobile computing) and animation, and I don't think it can be said he was a fraud like Edison. |
| Koriel Oct 11, 2011 2:39 PM EDT |
@Grish Well said Grish, Edison was a complete fraud climbing on the backs of others without giving them any recognition in the process. |
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