Ownership

In the last post I handed an eighty-year-old man a tablet holding his life’s work — every recorded teaching, transcribed and searchable, in a box he could hold. It was, I thought, a finished gift. It wasn’t, quite. And the reason taught me something about what “giving” really means. The tablet was in his hands. But the web address his teachings lived at was registered to me. The account that kept the whole thing reachable from the internet was mine. So in a quiet, hidden way, it was still my server — just sitting in his living room. A gift isn’t really given until it’s owned, and to finish, two hidden things had to change hands. ...

I built an audio app once. Then I built the same app again — and the second time took an afternoon. Not because I’m fast. Because I didn’t really build it again. I cloned it. I took the thing I already had, copied it onto a different machine, pointed it at a different home, and turned it on. That sounds ordinary until you notice you can’t do it with the apps you use every day. You can’t clone Netflix onto a relative’s device. You can’t copy your Spotify and hand it to a friend. The big apps are sealed boxes you rent access to. But software you build is yours, which means you can make copies of it the way you’d copy a key. ...