My main goals in a career are: to remained challenged and make innovative products. I enjoy using products from Apple because I usually think, "This is an intuitive, innovative, and elegant solution" and for me, Apple achieves this more than any other company. I'm a fan that borders on fanatic: my hair stands on end during good news at a Steve Jobs keynote, but I'm not a close-minded fan. I can see the good and bad when proprietary businesses and software are combined. A positive aspect is having a group of professionals focusing on a problem instead of people working only during their free time (passion is great though) and an easier time getting the message about a technology out to people. A negative aspect includes not being able to easily build upon, change current code, or being stuck with the solution they created. When I use proprietary software, I usually have a good experience but I remember that my experience will not get better if the company producing the software doesn't agree with my opinions or stops supporting the product entirely. Because of these aspects, I'm also open to working with the open source and free software communities. It will take a little more work because I'm unfamiliar with the dynamics of the community but the projects are there, waiting for me to investigate and help.
I would like to become involved with making open source and free software more accessible - taking it from the land of the geeks to users. Many distributions are doing very well at making GNU/Linux available to those who could not handle a low-level walkthrough. I also think it would be neat to examine and brainstorm about new user interface designs and widgets. I like examining ideas of alternative file systems, intuitive user interfaces, and the general computing experience from BeOS, Mac OS 9/X, and open source/free software groups. Researching how useful new ideas are would also bring insight into the most effective methods of strengthening the relationship between computers and humans.