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Stenoweb Home Page > Cory's Blog > Posts > Entitlement on the Retro Computing Scene
August 27
Entitlement on the Retro Computing Scene

You might be familiar with the fact that I run Ye Olde Computer Forum. If you've been reading my writings for several years now then I both applaud you for managing to follow me for so long, and apologize that you're about to see some stuff I'm sure you'll have seen before.

One of the things I see on a somewhat regular basis is people who feel like on whatever principle, they are entitled to something that other people on YOCF have. It has happened to me and others on a regular basis. I don't personally care to recount the number of times I've seen more or less "I want free stuff" posted in the trade section of the forum, or people who believe that just because they won't be making money with it or because it's not the current version, they should be given access to software for their old machines.

Some communities are better at controlling this type of stuff, although the "I want free physical goods" and "I want free software" issues can (and should) be mitigated in different ways. For example, on the Silicon Graphics and DEC scenes, the desire to have free physical goods is mitigated by the fact that those types of computers are just naturally expensive, and most of the people on the scene have owned them for long enough that they don't feel compelled to help the new guy out. The desire for free software is controlled on the DEC scene by the existence of hobbyist licensing, and on the Solaris scene by the fact that you can just put the effort into porting your own software.

Some of it truly is my own problem: I bought or found all of my own equipment and software by working hard, building relationships, and patiently waiting for deals on things to show up. I've told the story before, but I have a neatly imaged set of original diskettes with boxes, licensing papers, and documentation for a small computer lab's worth of software stored away. Years ago, somebody on the Internet talked about needing a copy of an old video editing program. (It was Adobe Premiere 3.0) He mentioned that he did have some video editing to do and while I thought he was foolish for trying to do it on a fifteen year old program, I happened to know that he had the hardware around to do it and so I didn't have any reason to disbelieve he was going to use the application.

You may or may not know the punchline to the story. At the time, I was less strict personally on the issue of sharing copies of very old commercial software, so I forwarded him a copy of the diskette images and the serial number, and within hours, he was editing his videos on a copy of Final Cut Pro, and my copy of Premiere 3.0 was up on his personal software archive web site, along with a news announcement that he'd found a real gem.

In part, I don't know what I expected to happen. I'd known he was working on the archive, but I hadn't thought he would bother to put my stuff on there, I suppose I had presumed that he had any amount of honor at all. It certainly wasn't explicitly mentioned that it would be going up on the public archive. It would probably matter less to me if it wasn't a piece of software I'd personally acquired. I had the box to it sitting on my desk at the time, and it was installed on my own Quadra 840av.

My issue with people who feel entitled to hardware is more basic than that; They stumble upon YOCF and see that some of us have a lot of hardware, and some of us don't have much, and either in an attempt to equalize the playing field, or just because they feel like there shouldn't be "haves" and "have-nots" in that type of situation, they start posting requests to have hardware given to them for free.

There are of course other variations on these themes. For example, I see people all the time argue that Apple should release new software and security patches for Mac OS X 10.5 on PowerPC-based hardware. People who own these systems feel entitled to it because they spent over a certain amount of money on their systems – even though they're well aware that Apple has short hardware support cycles compared to the rest of the industry, and the time of the cycle on their desktop OS is hilariously short. Heck, I have even spoken with people who own one of the original two iPhone models who feel entitled to having the iOS Application Store work a different way for their own convenience.

The problem with these last two bits is that these people feel entitled to continue using their preferred software on their preferred computer. At the base of it, that's fine. Heck, I feel like I'm allowed that choice on my own computers, too. The problem shows up when that choice leads to harmful consequences for other people on the Internet. In the olden days, you could run whatever software you wanted on your Apple II or Commodore 64 and even if it was the least secure code ever, your own action or inaction on the security front wasn't really hurting anybody. There was no centralized global network infrastructure that had the potential to be damaged if your computer did not have the right security patches, and each individual user could protect themselves (or their local network) by controlling what diskettes and software were used.

Today, however, nobody who is still running Windows XP (or Mac OS X 10.4, or old and insecure versions of Ubuntu) is going to take it upon themselves to remove their dangerously insecure old machine from the network.

Entitlement can be a funny thing, at least as it pertains to computing hobbyists who feel like they deserve something from the vendor or from a scene. It's interesting to see when I do and don't recognize my own entitlement, too, such as when I wanted Microsoft to continue selling SBS even though I'm sure there are good reasons they don't, or when I feel like there should be storage products targeted at both my need and my budget.

We've all got it, and the main differentiator seems to be how each person deals with it.

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