[cornercasechase]

I used to think this was the case as well, even though I suffered through the reality: computing was always a rich person's game. Even more so in the early days. Even a C64 was an upper middle class toy. Cosplaying counter cultural (really well) doesn't change the fact that if you cold afford to build the foundation of the computer industry, you were at least very aligned with capital. Now that alignment has been exposed, highlighted and scaled to global proportions.

[lovich]

My eyes were opened when I started realizing the Wikipedia pages of luminaries in the software field had blue links to their famous parents and those parents also had blue links to _their_ famous parents

Hell I’m guilty of some myself. I was surprised early in my career when I found out that most of my peers did not have a computer and internet access as children in the early 90s

[relaxing]

Who?

I checked Ritchie, Thompson, McCarthy, Sussman, Wirth… none had blue name parents.

[lovich]

Linus Torvalds? Maybe I’m the wrong age but that was one of the bigger names when I was starting my tech career

Edit: you’ve got luminaries like Stallman too, who didn’t have the rich family but did get the university they worked at to cover their living expenses. An uncomfortable amount of leaders in the Free Software and Open Source communities openly advocate for people to give away their time and effort for free, while living on the largesse of others

[aswegs8]

This is some low level criticism. Just because some one has successful parents it takes anything away from their accomplishments? I mean, it's always nice to root for the underdogs, I do too, but this Zeitgeist has just become childish.

[lovich]

I wasn’t diminishing or taking away their accomplishment's, their background doesn’t change what they did or made.

What I was critiquing was the fact that a seemingly inordinate number of people who advocate that your work in software should be free for anyone else to take without payment, also happen to not ever need to consider how they put food on the table due to wealth they inherited or were given due to their celebrity status

[relaxing]

I had no idea about Linus’s pedigree. Thanks!

[lovich]

No problem, it was an interesting history to read