Few things irritate the hacker mind more than
inefficiency. It was the inefficiency of checking the
Xerox laser printer two or three times a day that
triggered Stallman's initial inquiry into the printer
source code. It was the inefficiency of rewriting
software tools hijacked by commercial software vendors
that led Stallman to battle Symbolics and to launch the
GNU Project. If, as Jean Paul Sartre once opined, hell
is other people, hacker hell is duplicating other
people's stupid mistakes, and it's no exaggeration to
say that Stallman's entire life has been an attempt to
save mankind from these fiery depths.
This hell metaphor becomes all the more apparent as we
take in the slowly passing scenery. With its multitude
of shops, parking lots, and poorly timed street lights,
Kihei seems less like a city and more like a poorly
designed software program writ large. Instead of
rerouting traffic and distributing vehicles through
side streets and expressways, city planners have
elected to run everything through a single main drag.
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