Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs By Matt Yohe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Steve_Jobs_Headshot_2010-CROP.jpg

Sad news this week – Steve Jobs finally succumbed to his illness, after struggling on for years while appearing increasingly frail and fragile.

The media reaction has been remarkable, with everyone from president Obama to Bono eulogising the great man.

So far, I have only encountered one dissenting voice, and surprise surprise, it’s Doctor Richard Stallman. Last Thursday, he posted the following to his blog:

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.

Coming as it does so soon after Mr Jobs’ death the sentiment on display in the quote above seems rather harsh. I have no doubt that RMS is going to get into a lot of hot water for saying what he said. The problem is, I think there is more than a grain of truth to it.

Now in one way, I too owe a small debt of gratitude to Mr Jobs and Apple Computer. In 1992, having previously failed my ‘A’ levels twice, I was working as a full time kitchen porter in a restaurant in York. The chef was shouty and the kitchen was boiling hot, and I was beginning to fear for my future. One night after work, I called round to a friend’s house (he worked in the same restaurant as a waiter) and caught sight of his brand spanking new Apple Macintosh LC personal computer. I had previously owned a ZX Spectrum, but this machine was something else. After an hour or so clicking around the menus, I was convinced that I had just seen the future, and I proceeded to beg, borrow and steal the money I needed to buy one of my own.

Apple Macs were very different beasts in 1992 – expensive, rare and exclusive. You couldn’t buy them from just any shop – the Apple retail stores so common today did not yet exist. Despite all that, there was a definite sense of rebellion in being an Apple aficionado.  I quit my job in the kitchen, signed on the dole and locked myself in my room for a year to get to grips with my new Apple Mac. The following year I moved down to London and discovered something called ‘The World Wide Web’. During those early years of the web, I was a complete and total Apple obsessive. I read the literature, subscribed to the magazines, and paid a fortune to have the latest and greatest Powerbook. Steve Jobs, although not at Apple at the time, was a real hero. I remember buying a sticker for my Powerbook that said “Windows 95 = Macintosh ’89″.

Sometime in the mid 1990′s I remember deciding to have a crack at learning how to write CGI scripts in Perl. I naively thought that it would probably be no more difficult than learning HTML markup. I discovered that to really get to grips with Perl, first one needed to understand something called Unix. My Unix journey began with an amazing Apple Macintosh program called ‘Tenon Machten‘ that allowed you to run a complete Unix system inside a folder on your Macintosh desktop. Machten opened up a huge vista of opportunity to me – suddenly I understood how the Web functioned on a technical level, just from tinkering around with my Mac. It wasn’t long before I heard somebody mention the  magic word ‘Linux’.

Linux in the mid 1990′s was nothing like it is today. There was a GUI, there was a desktop and the Netscape browser, but not much else, unless you delved in to the command line. My experience of Unix with Machten had given me the perfect introduction to using the command line, and I took to Linux easily, mostly using it to run a webserver and database, while continuing to use the Apple Mac as my primary client machine.

Years passed, and the 1990′s drew to a close, and I found myself working for a London web agency called Lateral. Every single person in the company, apart from the accountant, had an Apple computer sitting on their desks. One day I was reading about Apple acquiring Next (The company Jobs founded after being ousted from Apple). The article set out how Apple were about dispose of the venerable ‘classic’ Mac OS, and replace it with Mac OSX, which would be based on a combination of the Next OS called Nextsep, and parts of FreeBSD. This meant that for the first time ever, the Apple Macintosh would be based upon Unix technology. This was exciting for me, and I decided that in preparation for OSX, I would start using Linux for my client machine, just to get more au fait with Unix and be prepared to adopt the new Apple OS (A few years before this, Apple had experimented with their own Linux Distro called ‘MKLinux‘ and I still have a copy for posterity).

In the year 2000, Apple finally released a Public beta of OSX, and I installed it on my new Pismo Powerbook. It was good, but rough around the edges. I started to use my Debian desktop more and more. Using Linux as my desktop machine caused me to take more of an interest in Free Software, and I began to read about Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and Ian Murdoch. I visited a conference at Cambridge University, attended by RMS himself.

When I left Lateral at Christmas 2001, they bought me a first generation iPod as my leaving present, and I was so impressed I seriously considered spending my savings on Apple Shares (I wish I had). But looking back, that iPod marked a change from Apple as ‘rebel alliance’ to Apple as ‘big scary producer of consumer products’. They even dropped the word ‘Computer’ from ‘Apple Computer’.

Since then, I stopped buying Apple and started evangelising Free Software. I believe that the web is the most amazing thing that has happened to humanity so far. I believe that Tim Berners-lee really has changed the World for the better, and has done so without any profit motive. The same goes for Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds. Free Software provides the tools we need to effectively communicate. The Word Wide Web is built upon Free Software. None of these innovations were about money – rather they were about openness, freedom and philosophy.

Steve Jobs has presided over an increasingly closed and powerful regime that has pioneered the ‘walled garden’ model of computing – a model where Apple dictates what people can and cannot use their own computers for.  Apple has also appropriated key technologies from elsewhere, the famous example being the Mac OS desktop from the Xerox PARC research facility. In one sense,  rather than change the World for the better, Steve Jobs has exploited it for his own ends.

Having said all that, it would be a very mean spirited person indeed who is not moved by the famous Stanford Commencement Speech.

I (along with millions of others) am attracted to and fascinated by the legend of Steve Jobs. Like most legends however, the truth is a little more prosaic.

An erudite defence of RMS can be found here.