In NO way anyone is making a comparison of Steve Jobs to a dictator. The original post was claiming:
> It's a habit of the internet diaspora to label a person either good or bad
> Steve, like any other human, is a shade of grey.
i.e. the completely correct but also completely useless claim that there is no person who is absolutely evil or absolutely good . What the analogy is trying to do here is to say "OK, so you don't think Hitler is absolutely evil?", not "OK, so you don't think Steve Jobs is Hitler?".
Since they’re long dead, little is lost by labeling them evil. But the closer they are to our present time, the more we must sacrifice by declaring someone an anathema. Worst of all is living people, of course.
Those are extreme exceptions. Steve Jobs and the others you mentioned are not even in close leagues. That was my point, we try to judge everyone with the same yardstick and divide them in strict binary buckets. By that logic, Steve Jobs would either belong to same category as either Hitler or Gandhi.
Are they exceptions? I'm sure they had normal families and lives prior to their murderous transitions.
My point is be careful how much you choose to let people get away with a "they're just human" pass. Some people deserve the labels. For anyone that worked with Steve I'm willing to bet they think he deserves the arsehole label they give him.
...But at least he wasn't Larry Ellison.