I’m among the people who are puzzled by all the fantastic tributes that you can find around Steve Jobs. Not that he doesn’t deserve to be recognized as the CEO of Apple, one of the most brilliant marketer of easy to use IT products.
Of course he helped his company realizing products which have had influence on lots of people worldwide. But for me, this manifestation of over celebration doesn’t place the emphasis on the right level: the inventors, the engineers, the creators.
Our epoch is prompt to value the guys who sale (and they are needed, and have their role), but forget to celebrate the inventors, the guy without who nothing at all would have been possible. Just the week after the names of Nobel prices were announced, and were most people already forgot their names, whereas what they have fone is what is really modifying our lives.
From an Open Source perspctive, Steve Jobs has taken lots of the benefits of the BSD license, but didn’t realy transform Apple into a big Open Source player. Worse, he made everything to kept the platform as proprietary as possible. That’s probably why I’ve never bought one of their product. I’m still a fan of the PC where you can add the cards of your choice, the OS of your choice, the boot loader of your choice, and transform this versatile machine into what you want. Far from the easy appliance concept brought by Steve Jobs, but hey, there is room for everybody.
Of course, I’m touched by the fact he suffered from his disease, and fill sad of that as there is no good reason why a man should be touched like he was. But I continue to be happy that the other founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, the person who invented a computer and was releasing plans for it, is still around with us 😉
The fact he is today behind the Fusion-IO team shows that he still detects what makes sense in the technology area,and is involved where it makes fun to be. Not too far from Linus’s book title “Just for fun”.
So kudos to Steve Wozniak who changed the computer industry somewhere, and still is. Kudos to a Linus Torvalds who decided to deliver his work under the GPL to create one of the most amazing creation of the IT, the Linux kernel. And kudos to the thousands of free software developpers who do the same, including some of them at Apple. Hopfully people will realize that you are the one who make computing history as well and deserve tributes.
Bruno Cornec's Blog 