Steve Jobs and "Freedom"

I know I'm late to the party on this one, but I had to link this Gawker post with an email exchange between Ryan Tate and Steve Jobs. I think that it's great that Steve Jobs is so willing to engage with his customers and critics, even if it is 90% posturing and marketing spin.

I wonder what the exchange would have been like if Ryan had been Richard Stallman? It's interesting to me how the word "freedom" has taken on different meanings over the last decade or so. I quote the following from Merriam-Webster's dictionary:

Main Entry: free·dom
Function: noun
1 : the quality or state of being free: as a : the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action b : liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another c : the quality or state of being exempt or released from something onerous

I think when most of us talk about freedom we're thinking about 1a and 1b... I think that Apple looks at freedom as 1c and that the emphasis is on the word onerous:

Main Entry: oner·ous
Function: adjective
1 : excessively burdensome or costly
2 : involving a return benefit, compensation, or consideration onerous donation

Why that definition sounds like a description of most Apple hardware! And, in the interest of full disclosure, I am typing this blog entry on a Mac...

Come on Steve, get with the program. No one buys that Apple is about freedom. Apple is about profit and as its CEO you have a fiduciary responsibility to protect that profit. No one is going to blame you for doing your job, but lets cut the "freedom" rhetoric... or at the very least practice what you preach and trade in your iPad for a Lemote Yeeloong the only computer that actually can run all free software (and hence meet the primary definition of freedom).