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No 'Rue Steve Jobs' in Paris

December 14, 2016

Steve Jobs may have been a technological revolutionary, but his legacy will not be remembered in a Paris street name. Left-leaning politicians didn't want to see his name around in a new tech startup campus.

https://p.dw.com/p/2UEwN
Steve Jobs
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. G. Mabanglo

Steve Job's name was one of several famous figures from the technology industry proposed to adorn new streets in a future tech startup campus in the French capital.

The socialist local district mayor, Jerome Coumet, had proposed naming one of the new roads "Rue Steve Jobs," but the name of the former CEO of Apple, who died in 2011, didn't even make it to the voting booths after objections from communists and ecologists.

The suggestion of Jobs had not received unanimous backing, according to Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo's first deputy, Bruno Julliard.

Doubtful legacy?

He explained the American's name was dropped from the Paris Council vote "in the spirit of a tradition of compromise."

Opponents had hit out at Steve Job's "legacy of insufficient wages, forced overtime for Apple subcontractors and use of illegal tax arrangements."

Instead, roads in the new tech hub will now be named after Ada Lovelace, widely regarded as the first computer programmer, computer scientist Karen Sparck Jones and Eugene Freyssinet, a structural and civil engineer.

hg/jd (AFP, Reuters)