Archive for the ‘Liberty’ Category
Steve Jobs & Apple pull a James Watt and sue HTC!
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Liberty, News, Technology
Steve Jobs says he would rather throw lawyers at his competitors rather than honestly compete:
We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it … We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours. (emphasis mine)
This, from the company whose flagship software product, Mac OS X, is built upon a foundation of BSD Unix. For those of you who don’t know, the BSD license is the most liberal, most open, most non-intellectual-property-enforcing license I know of in the software world. It is just short of committing your code to the public domain. This is what Apple uses as the basis of its most important software product after iTunes.
Reading Garet Garrett and loving it!
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Liberty
Friday I picked up The Driver by Garet Garrett, one of America’s forgotten geniuses. His prose reminds me occasionally of G.K. Chesterton, perhaps because they were from the same era (early 20th century) and thus have a similar lexicon.
The story takes place in 1892 in the midst of soaring unemployment, monetary chaos, and government and corporations going bankrupt left and right. It is the story of a man who in spite of the bad news, insists on an indomitable optimism. He is either visionary or crazy. He is sinking the last of his wealthy family’s money into a long-shot railroad company on the verge of bankruptcy.
Will he send his three-generation household into poverty, or will he build a railway empire that will both make him fabulously rich and save the economy at the same time?
I don’t know the answer just yet. I’m only half way through. Garrett has a talent for evoking the epic drama involved in entrepreneurism.
BookerFox is now an approved Firefox add-on!
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Liberty
You can download BookerFox now through the Add-Ons dialog in Firefox. A handful of refinements will be coming soon.