Coburlins new name

[Howard Owen]

It's amusing how the discussion here mirrors older threads on the original board. I resented Coburlin because he was exploiting hobbyists like me. I had this idea that the community I was a part of had more than a mere commercial interest in the machines we loved. This had an element of hypocrisy since the bum was scooping up hardware I wanted with ridiculously low prices, then turning around to sell them at prices I wouldn't pay.

But the impulse came from my experience as a technology enthusiast from the 1970s forward. User groups, like PPC, Apple ][ users and even Usenix and Decus had a lot of folks who were interested in sharing and trading. These folks sometimes looked askance at commercial exploitation of the technology. Some were idealists, like Richard Stallman and others just didn't want other folks to exploit their work without getting their due - in money or fame or both. There was also a bit of the same hypocrisy I mentioned above. I recall, for instance, my resentment when Apple came out with the Mac - a closed box that I couldn't afford. Speaking for myself, a lot of this was naivete, but there was also a core of idealism. Richard Stallman and the GNU project came out of an academia that shared many of the same values as the user groups. He saw proprietary software as immoral, which set a firm goalpost on one end of the software political spectrum.

I was a Free Software enthusiast all through my career as a systems nerd. I blessed rms for his rectitude, but my main interest was in getting things done by leveraging the various communities. Participating in the HP calculator community brought back the earlier idealism I felt when ripping off Apple ][ software - I mean learning how computer architecture worked. Despite that irony, I had (and have) a genuine fondness for celebrating technology for its own sake. Buying and selling the old machines was fun (I don't do it much anymore) but I always had this feeling that the commercial interest cut against the enjoyment.

But yes, the United States is the home of caveat emptor. As long as representations aren't provably, criminally fraudulent, pretty much anything goes. Coburlin is legally entitled to slaughter his lambs. It's just that it seems a little messy to me sometimes.