It's definitely one of the saddest stories in our industry. Peter Norton's books literally taught me to program as a teenager, and now his name is synonymous with mal/bloatware.
It'd be nice if shoutouts included time spans, thusly:
"In my travels, I always had my copies of Norton [1981-1989] books and utilities."
I respect any artist (creator) that manages to get paid, so I don't begrudge the sale/merger with Symantic. It's just too bad Things Fall Apart because number must go up.
It is sad to again and again be reminded that even the ones we see as heroes earlier in our lives, could do something to kind of "tarnish" our idea of them. I think lately I've gotten better at handling coming across this, as I'm getting better at realizing we're all just humans, and what we see from these public people is often just a small selected slice, we're all flawed in our ways, but we typically don't get to see those unless it's something extreme, one way or another.
Many cases of this happening too, people loved and celebrated for years/decades, then does something that just absolutely tarnishes everything they would have been remembered for. Philippe Pétain comes to mind as an extreme example, one of France's greatest national heroes up until late in his life, he became head of the Vichy regime and collaborated closely with Nazi Germany.
Comparing Norton selling their company (even to a scummy owner like Symantec) to Pétain collaborating with Nazi Germany feels a bit ... extreme ... to me.
Yeah, I don't doubt that he did what he thought was best, I think most if not all humans do that most of the time. But I do think the general sentiment about him did shift a bit after he made that choice, which was the point.
