I'm with doteka on this. I think techie entitlement is a bigger problem than self-righteousness. As Kyle Mitchell (kemitchell on HN) put it recently in his essay "No Thanks" [1]:
> From outside software looking in, “software freedom” walks and talks a lot more like “coder entitlement” or “coder privilege”. In short, a hacker on a tear should never hear the word “no”. Not when breaking into offices to steal parts for a train set. Not when contending with a printer they didn’t develop or pay for. Not when building the next hot web or mobile app … again. Not when building a war cloud or optimizing a baby-photo reinforcement schedule for grandma.
Do we not realize how entitled and selfish we are?
And no, I've never done a hackintosh, either virtual or physical.
I read the full essay. I don't think his points are wrong, but I think his conclusion is. It's not that "techies" are entitled, just that most of the world isn't going to understand the benefits "software freedom". That doesn't mean they shouldn't care.
A few months ago, I read Cory Doctorow's short story "Unauthorized Bread"[1]. It's an exceptionally preachy story about a refugee in near-future America, but the point it gets across is this: closed computer systems are a tool for the powerful to control the powerless, and the consequences will be felt by both tech-enthusiasts and technophobes alike.
Personally, what I want is for more people to become adept at using their computers, so they become capable of taking advantage of open platforms, and with it, agency over their lives. That's one reason I was volunteering at Girls Who Code before the Coronavirus shut everything down. I don't necessarily expect all the 10 year olds I work with to grow up to become programmers, but if they're comfortable making quick edits to a python script in order to better accomplish a mundane task, that's a really powerful skill!
>Do we not realize how entitled and selfish we are?
jesus christ what are you talking about. i should feel morally obligated to a corporation? or maybe tim cook himself? this isn't a moral quandary or question and never will be. you people have deeply internalized a relationship to money and corporations that is perverse. like any good business person would say: it's not personal it's business - if they want to prevent me from using their software in a way that violates the EULA or whatever then cool they can try to stop me (note: they have in the past and will continue into the future and so the world will turn).
re those poor poor apple engineers: apple's market cap is 1.24T (that's a capital T for trillion). oh no will someone please think of them and their margins! i'm (100-epsilon)% sure that not a single apple engineer will ever suffer any hardship from a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of their customer/user base building hackintoshes.
But my question with piracy is always, where do you dry the line? Is pirating Photoshop okay? What about Affinity Photo? What about Omnigroup, which makes fantastic software, but also has to charge a lot of money for it, and was forced to do a round of layoffs recently?
What if the app is made by a single developer, but you don't like his or her politics? Or what if it's a single developer charging too much? How do you determine what "too much" is, and are you really able to be a fair judge, given that you have a personal financial stake in the outcome?
As a Hackintosh user, I don't have all the answers. I tell myself Hackintosh is okay because I used a real Mac to download the installer, but that's still a moral judgement I'm not able to make impartially. I do try to avoid pirating all forms of digital media, though, even when it means there are products I simply cannot use due to lack of finances.
> But my question with piracy is always, where do you dry the line?
this has already been hashed out during the late 90s and early 00s in the context of media piracy: software and media are non-rivalrous goods. me pirating the good does not prevent anyone else from purchasing. it is not a loss to the developer or content creator because i was never going to purchase it in the first place.
> but that's still a moral judgement I'm not able to make impartially
there are zero moral issues implicated here. property is outside of morality.
> it is not a loss to the developer or content creator because i was never going to purchase it in the first place.
How do you know that you were "never going to purchase it in the first place"? There are lots of products where I initially looked at the price tag, thought "that's ridiculous", and walked away—but eventually came back and bought it, sometimes kicking and screaming.
Again, I don't think I can make a fair judgement about what I "would buy" when I have a financial stake in convincing myself one way. And I don't think anyone else can actually do it either.
> Again, I don't think I can make a fair judgement about what I "would buy" when I have a financial stake
i'm at a loss for to how parse this let alone how to respond to it. who else but you "can make a fair judgement" about whether you'll buy something?
i don't have shifting perspectives on whether i'll buy something - i either decide to buy something or i decide not to buy it. if i decide to buy something but i don't have money for it i save money and buy it eventually.
to drive home the point: i pirate movies instead of going to theaters. if some movie that i was interested in seeing never gets released on some torrent site i do not buy that movie i simply do not watch it. on the other hand i do buy books even though i could pirate them easily.
> From outside software looking in, “software freedom” walks and talks a lot more like “coder entitlement” or “coder privilege”. In short, a hacker on a tear should never hear the word “no”. Not when breaking into offices to steal parts for a train set. Not when contending with a printer they didn’t develop or pay for. Not when building the next hot web or mobile app … again. Not when building a war cloud or optimizing a baby-photo reinforcement schedule for grandma.
Do we not realize how entitled and selfish we are?
And no, I've never done a hackintosh, either virtual or physical.
[1]: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/04/17/No-Thanks.html