Friday, March 16, 2007

Daring Fireball on Thurrott & Paul Kedrosky on Jobs on DRM & Music

Over the last couple months I was beginning to loose faith in Gruber's ability to present a good solid argument. In one of his more recent posts Gruber does an excellent job at addressing key issues concerning the open letter from Steve Jobs about removing DRM from music: http://daringfireball.net/2007/02/command_option_control.

He does a better job than I could have at getting at the crux of the matter. I still really wish he would do away with calling people jackasses. You hear me John, you are a better writer than that and can do a much better job by convincing people with solid research and well composed arguments.

It's well worth the read.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nonsense. Gruber's use of "jackass" is pointed and deliberate. It illustrates, with clarity, his opinion of the person at hand. In this case it's Thurrott.

His argument is every bit as cogent as it would be sans "jackass", but "jackass" adds something equally important.

Passion.

This trend of telling people to sanitize their language and never ever say what they feel in blunt, occasionally brutal language is not increasing clarity, nor is it making for better writing. What it is doing is sterilizing, or attempting to sterilize all our interactions until there's no sense of personality, unless it's a personality that has no chance to offend, or even mildly interest anyone.

Is Jackass nice? No, and that's not a bad thing. John's not trying to be nice. He's trying to be John, and express his opinions with not only knowledge and research and well-composed arguments, but with passion and personality.

Those have just as much a place in writing as anything else, and some would argue, they have a higher place.