@adx when a technology empowers, entrenches, and elevates the powerful at the expense of everyone else, if you're "the powerful" it starts to look like a great idea and you're not sure why everyone wouldn't be on board
Sure you are, if you bother to ask yourself whether everyone else has the same access.
There was no call for Butlerian Jihad against microcomputers in the 1980s. Why? Because anyone could buy one!
And Linus clearly did ask himself, because he outright said that he doesn't want people to contribute unless they have the resources to function in today's world, or something like that. It was a painfully elitist take, given that the resource in question is, first and foremost, money.
@argv_minus_one (they were very expensive at the time, but they were also visibly in the process of getting much cheaper so eh yeah somewhat)
Hmm? The VIC-20's launch price was $299.95, equivalent to $1226.52 today. Not dirt cheap, but not completely unreasonable either. You didn't need big corporate money to buy one.
@argv_minus_one well, my definition of "cheap" gets met a while later when it becomes possible to buy obsolete machines for peanuts secondhand, or even to dumpster dive.
In the 1980s, that wouldn't have taken long. Machines became obsolete very quickly back then.