Had to deal with a minor protest today. They were actually blocking my way to work, and while on a motorbike I can usually just dodge around people, they were protesting just a few blocks down from our office. That means that OTHER people would be late, and that would lead to a loss of productivity, and so you can see why I had to put a stop to things.
I’m still a bit unsure what it was about, mostly because they themselves didn’t need to know. One guy was holding a sign that said ‘Melbourne App Design Courses Deserve Respect!’ but someone else was holding another sign that read ‘Down With App Design!’
So they don’t really seem like they’d go together. Eventually I managed to work out that the building was a tech start-up that had been developing custom apps, but they’d been accused of hacking into the university database and stealing prototype apps that students had submitted for assignments. The police had dismissed the case, but a lot of the students were still angry that their work was being commercialised. Whether or not any of it was true was another matter entirely, but I had to clear the blockage. So I did, with a bit of a rousing speech that came out of nowhere…I just have the right words to say sometimes, I guess. Still, I kept thinking about the case for the rest of the day. Apparently there were also web and software design templates stolen. I looked into the start-up and they seemed pretty clean. But then I looked into the website set up by the students, and it all looked a bit shady.
I’m no internet justice warrior person, but no student should have their future stolen away and used for profit. So I might have…ah, aroused a bit of affirmative action on some select forums. Pretty soon, all the best web development course students from across the world were looking into the case and signing a petition. And just like that, the start-up’s website vanished and was replaced by something that didn’t look quite as good…but at least they made it themselves.
-Mack