Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

by Ken Kocienda

It was also a time when many Silicon Valley software companies started experimenting with free software and plans for turning a profit by developing software they wouldn’t charge their customers to use. This seemingly paradoxical corporate strategy had its roots with Richard Stallman, a renowned programmer and technology activist, a man who believed all software should be free. Stallman railed against companies like Microsoft and Apple, which sold software for money, but kept the source code, the software instructions written by programmers, as a proprietary trade secret. In Stallman’s idiosyncratic belief system, mixing computer code and the profit motive formed a toxic brew whose ill effects compelled companies to hoard the intellectual effort required to write programs and turned software development into a zero-sum game that impeded the advance of technology to the detriment of the human race. If you’re not a programmer, free software might echo with sixties-style hippie idealism.

History has shown this didn’t work, and while Netscape didn’t survive as a stand-alone company, it did ship the open source version of its browser code, christened with a new name: Mozilla. Mozilla had made it out the door with much thanks to Don, my new Eazel colleague, since he was responsible for purging all the dirty words from the source code before it was released.

Adapting the code written for one operating system so that it works on another is common enough that programmers have a word to describe the task: porting.

“Apple’s problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers.”3

significant part of attaining excellence in any field is closing the gap between the accidental and intentional, to achieve not just a something or even an everything but a specific and well-chosen thing, to take words and turn them into a vision, and then use the vision to spur the actions that create the results.

“The judgement of taste itself does not postulate the agreement of everyone (for that can only be done by a logically universal judgement because it can adduce reasons); it only imputes this agreement to every one, as a case of the rule in respect of which it expects, not confirmation by concepts, but assent from others.”6