One thing I find a bit silly about this debate is how seriously we developers tend to take it. We toss around words like "enemy", "devil", and "evil", to describe a company that manufactures consumer electronics.
I realize that many of us care deeply about open source software, and hope that the field we work in does not become tightly controlled, but let's face it: it's not like Apple is producing weapons of mass destruction, or cheap guns intended for street gangs, or cigarettes.
If we showed an iPad to the average person, and said, "Look how EVIL this is!", they'd probably be more than a little confused.
He quotes from research derived from watching a group of neurotics that consistently defended itself against his [the researcher] attempts to make them do what they had ostensible gathered themselves together for. The second pattern of defensive behavior was identifying a common enemy. Clay writes:
"The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.
So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies."
So let's forget about Apple or Microsoft or any other so-called-enemy for awhile and get back to coding and "defeat" them the old-fashioned way.
Without the freedom to tinker, the internet wouldn't have happened. There wouldn't have been such an incredibly rapid evolution of technology. Open source ensures that this kind of freedom remains in place.
I realize that many of us care deeply about open source software, and hope that the field we work in does not become tightly controlled, but let's face it: it's not like Apple is producing weapons of mass destruction, or cheap guns intended for street gangs, or cigarettes.
If we showed an iPad to the average person, and said, "Look how EVIL this is!", they'd probably be more than a little confused.