Harry McCracken, for Technologizer:

If you think people who use Apple products are prisoners, you’re essentially accusing them of being too stupid to make their own decisions. At least Stallman explicitly calls them fools! [Eric S.] Raymond, with his pretty-window-treatment metaphor, apparently thinks Apple users are style-obsessed fetishists, too dim to make the right purchasing decisions. Which, oddly enough, is the same stance that Microsoft has been known to take.

Richard M. Stallman’s comments on Steve Jobs this past week infuriated me, and I’m grateful that the always-cogent Harry McCracken had the clarity of thought to articulate a very well-formed argument explaining why Stallman and another free software advocate, Eric Raymond, are so wrong in how they think about how people should interact with computers.