alt Hacker NewsYou know I'm not a huge fan of Jobs, but I do think he was a lot more complicated than the pantomime villain he sometimes gets characterised as. On this particular topic he was, on the contrary, the progenitor of this:
https://www.folklore.org/Signing_Party.html
So no "of course" about it.
Note also that Microsoft had a "no easter eggs" policy starting in the early 2000s. It's not really a Jobs thing.
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> Microsoft had a "no easter eggs" policy starting in the early 2000s
Note that this was in the aftermath of a summer with multiple major XP security issues.
I posted the same link and then realized you already had.
There's a grain of truth to the grandparent comment but it is distorted by Occupy Wall Street ideology.
Article says:
"... Steve Jobs reportedly banning them in 1997 when he returned to Apple ..."
Jobs was driven. Driven means a lot of things good or bad. It means some people get their feet stepped on because they're milling about instead of moving. People don't understand that doing nothing when there is Shit to Get Done isn't neutral, it's obstructive, and that makes you the Enemy of the Driven.
Yeah. I think the "signed case" also has some distinctions compared to a typical software easter egg:
- the effects of it are clear
- there's basically no chance of unexpected side effects (I suppose in theory it could structurally weaken the case if the signatures were carved too deeply...)
- if a user stumbles upon it the intention is pretty clear and obviously harmless
- it's not something that might get snuck in without approval of senior management, because it's not hidden in that sense, so there is a limiter on how many of them accumulate and how complicated they might get
which help to explain why you might by policy forbid software easter eggs while still being an advocate for "signing your work".