The Notebook
Today something really interesting happened.
I take the majority of my classes with an older woman. This would be completely fine and uneventful, except that she likes to talk. A lot. More than most of our professors, and sometimes just won’t shut up about the stupidest thing in the world. </vent> Anyway, she is the kind of person that has got an opinion on any and everything and is very stubborn. Well, she’s verry narrow and close minded. That’s the impression I got from her, being with her for four to five hours, every day, for the past couple of months.
So as I was leaving our Sociology class today, someone asked to photocopy her notebook where she kept tracks of all the subjects the professor had covered this term. She then laughed and said, snobbishly, “My son had warned me this would happen.”
These are the types of people that do not like to share. That claim their “work” as theirs only and want the rest of the world to go to hell. This is not an apology to the people who don’t copy anything or don’t come to classes and then want to do well anyway, because these people are going to fail sooner or later, so why bother? How can you keep private something that someone else shared with you and is not even yours to claim?
This is exactly the same fight about open source systems and people that don’t share their codes. When I was getting a degree in Computer Science, some people thought they were very much special and that all their work was theirs only and non-shareable, while others were quite brilliant, always helping us, poor unnerdy souls, always writing articles and tutorials. Interesting enough, these people grew much more than the others that didn’t want to “share the knowledge” and are now endlessly more successful than these other people. Not to mention they have many more friends.