First of all, I am glad that for once I had a vision 🙂
This is nothing too big, and I was not original, but I kinda-sorta thought that iPad would be a great name: it leverages off the ThinkPad name brand, it follows the suit of other “i” products (iPod, iPhone, iWork, iMac, etc.), it gives you an idea about the form-factor (it’s a ‘pad,’ not a ‘slate,’ not a ‘tablet’).
But this is not what I wanted to write about. I am torn between Gruber and Doctorow. Between Pilgrim and Ihnatko. I am not sure anymore where’s the dark side, where’s the light one. Nor whether all I am seeing is just the duct tape…
I am no RMS. I do not have any will power to stay the course consistently, driving his point on free software with religious rigor. I like it when things just work, though I also love to tinker with things, trying to figure why/how/if things work. I am a tinkerer, but I am not making any living out of that and this makes me a weakling, easy to fall for a nice and shiny package.
I love my MacBook Pro. I loved my PowerBook G4 and still love it. But I also love the power of logging into my FreeBSD box which served me as a server for many years. I am immensely greateful to those people who’ve spent uncounted hours getting *BSD or Linux distros to work, taking them to the level they’re no on. None of this could ever happen had the world been just a little more closed, restrictive and locked-in as it seems to becoming now.
Or is it? Is it truly as closed as we think? Maybe this is merely a point of view, based on what we, we’ve our baggage of the past 20-30 years perceive to be open or closed? Or is this a gradually restricted, slowly turning onto myself me talking? The ‘me’ that is turning against ‘me’?
I am torn. I don’t know what’s light and what’s dark…