Nik Cubrilovic tells it like it is:
Geeks and enthusiasts wearing WordPress t-shirts, using laptops covered in Data Portability, Microformats and RSS stickers lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM. The irony was lost on some as they ran home, docked their new devices into a proprietary media player and downloaded closed source applications wrapped in DRM.
I am referring to the new iPhone – and the new Apple iPhone SDK that allows developers to build ‘native’ applications. The announcement was greeted with a web-wide standing ovation, especially from the developer community. The same community who demand all from Microsoft, feel gifted and special when Apple give them an inch of rope. When Microsoft introduced DRM into Media Player it was bad bad bad – and it wasn’t even mandatory, it simply allowed content owners a way to distribute and sell content from anywhere.
Apple has wrapped the iPhone SDK in enough licensing, security controls and right management that it would make the Microsoft Active Desktop team blush. The phone and platform that is certain to soon take second spot behind Symbian in the smart phone market is also the most restricted and closed. Applications can only be installed from a single source, iTunes, and open source applications and distribution is near impossible. How do you install an iPhone application without iTunes? Where are the community advocates arguing for a standard interface, openess and free code? [READ ON]
The Free Software Foundation’s DefectiveByDesign group put out its five reasons to avoid the iPhone 3G Friday but it’s gotten little traction. Even Tim Wu, the famous iPhone freedom fighter, recently declared iSurrender:
That may sound like trading a dune buggy for a Toyota Corolla. But like most such decisions, there is a depressing inevitability to the whole thing…
And with that we’re off on a lesson in natural monopoly:
The fact that someone like me is switching to AT&T is a sign of the times in the telephone world. The wireless industry was once and is still sometimes called a “poster child for competition.” That kind of talk needs to end. Today, the industry is more like an old divorced couple; the bickering spouses are AT&T and Verizon, the two halves of the old Bell empire. (To its credit, the Bell company, in internal memos, proposed a wireless phone in 1915 and then spent 70 or so years deciding how to deploy it without hurting its wired-phone business.) While you can’t blame this on the iPhone, nearly every non-Bell phone company is, in the long tradition of such firms, dying or being purchased…
The underlying reasons for Bell dominance are Washington politics and the economics of natural monopoly. Some markets, because of the sheer costs of being a player, tend toward either a single firm or a small number of firms. Infrastructure and utility markets are the classic examples: bridges, plumbing, and electric systems. Everyone hoped and thought the wireless market would be different. But it’s not, in part because of well-meaning policies. “Fair” spectrum auctions cost billions and thereby create the conditions of natural monopoly, over time making the industry a one- or two-horse show.
He sees a glimmer of hope (but only just) in the Open Handset Alliance. For a big picture look at the larger topic, Tim O’Reilly, a supporter of the free software and open source movements who is widely credited with coining the term Web 2.0, gave a highly accessible and provocative talk at last year’s Open Source Conference on the meaning of freedom and Open Source:
What exactly makes a piece of Open Source software ‘open’ in the first place? Is it that it is available free of charge? Or that users have the ability to improve upon it and even create their own version of the software? Or that participation is open to anyone and everyone? Or a combination of all of the above? O’Reilly runs through a few of the ways in which he believes Open Source software should be classified.
The term Open Source is also making its way onto the world wide web, where Web 2.0 applications are pushing the envelope of user interactivity in ways never before envisioned. For example, Facebook and Google Maps (just to name a few) allow users to create their own applications based on their platforms. Users can share with their friends, or make maps to show where people with similar hobbies or interests live.
This year’s OSCON 2008 is next week in Portland, OR.