[NhanH]

I just want to point out that the "entrepreneur" with 20 years career did not just start recently: if it's bad, then it has been a while.

>We did it because there was an inexhaustible quantity of information to be learned about a subject that was dear to us. We used archie and gopher to transfer open source software around and share knowledge. We snuck into computer labs at neighboring universities to get our hands on computers that we otherwise would have no access to.

I've always found the stories of people snucking into computer labs (mostly MIT or near by universities, I believe) of the past inspiring. In a sense, luckily nowadays we don't have to do that anymore. On the other hand, it's unfortunate that you will surely be spending time in jails if you do something like that.

>And there was altruism within the Internet community.

There is this community called "Hacker News", which the head honcho believes that "Mean people fails". So I'd strongly disagree that there is no altruism within the Internet community.

[fragmede]

http://paulgraham.com/mean.html, which I missed the first time around. Which I find very interesting when juxtaposed against the Steve Jobs hero worship that also goes on around here.

[NhanH]

I've never liked the characteristics of Steve Jobs (and 90s Bill Gates) as mean. They're what I'd called "evil" - in the sense that they will do anything to get the works done, ethics or social norms be damned. But that's much different than being "mean". You can certainly be "evil" (with the quoted definition of evil above), but not mean.

Not that it's fine being "evil", but that's another discussion.