Broken Apple Heart - Why I'm a Mac user no more

Beware of that Fruit (Broken Apple Heart) ( http://bah.draketo.de/?p=13 )

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(What do you think, why Macs no longer Smile?)

Chorus: I was an Apple User and loyal to the core,
But one grey day I realized what made my heartache soar,
They want to make the big bucks now and want no one to see,
That ever more surveillance takes the Users rights as fee.

–

I was a little Bugger, when I saw the first of Mac,
Discovered there then Shufflepuck and all the time came back,
It belonged to parents friends then, but my will it showed its grip,
And when they tried to take “My Mac”, their efforts meant a zip.

–

My third Mac, it was bigger, not so cute, but lovely, too,
And to my greatest pleasure, I owned the smiling goo,
I was a big fanatic, Apple was it all the time,
And when I got to talking, all my friends could do was wine.

–

Then came the time of MacOSX, it was the thing for me,
The beta was the slowest beast, but with it I felt free,
I worked and it grew faster and I never bid the time,
And every single Update pushed the speed another line.

–

But then they made the panther and it hated my old Mac,
And though I bought a new one, my belief did not come back,
Then came OSX on intel, my belief lost every race,
Apple takes “trusted computing”, hits me squarely in the face.

–

Now my Mac here owns a Linux and Apple makes no gain,
Since for my precious income I want freedom and no chain,
So I switch on to a Linux, MacOSX I use the least,
with those lovely little penguins I take midsummers feast.

–

Some days Im feeling sad and my parting brings me pain,
But without freedom for their Users, all their genius is in vain,
When I’d come back to Apple, I will tell them with delight,
To get me back they must adhere to freedom and my rights,
They must adhere to freedom and to every Users rights.

• Arne Babenhauserheide ( http://draketo.de )

Dear Steve Jobs,

I once left Apple after a Life of using Macs because you included the TPM chip in the Intel Macs, and I’ve been an active opponent to Apple ever since, because DRM and Trusted Computing aka Treacherous Computing go against everything I believe right in informatics and you had just made Apple the spearhead of DRM.

I’m not likely return as user (I’ve grown too fond of KDE for that), but I am likely to return as supporter, if you decide to give back the rights of your users to manage their own computers freely.

DRM takes away freedom from users, and I can’t support anybody who takes the freedom of people to turn it into profit. You have the option now, to shape Apple into a “good guy” again, and I urge you with all my heart to do it. You broke my heart in the past, but you might be on the way to mend it… and until you do so, I’m going to sing the song into which I shaped my pain back then: