To elaborate on the analogy: Books cannot change the world if they lie unread on a shelf or are confiscated or impounded and kept out of people’s hands. In th

To elaborate on the analogy: Books cannot change the world if they lie unread on a shelf or are confiscated or impounded and kept out of people’s hands. In the same way, software cannot be useful to you if your hardware will not run it. Therefore we cannot think that by being programmers making software, we are directly helping people; we can only help those people who can, and will, run our software.