The City Inside the Walls, or closing the gates on innovation.

A disturbing trend is bolting through the technological world at teraflop speed.  Two technological giants are working feverishly to marginalize both independent third-party development and the very concept of Open Source, not to mention the Open Source Community.  The trend is the development of closed systems (think iPhone, iPad and Windows Surface), which will only run applications from vendors who have paid Apple or Microsoft up front, and further forced to forego as much as 30% of their application price to these company's "app stores."  This is disturbing for a number of reasons.

First, it limits the users choice in applications, from the Operating System all the way down line.  It decimates the idea of freeware, and discourages developers from writing for these platforms because of the inherent costs, bureaucratic hoops and overall inconvenience. Since the advent of the Personal Computer, you have had a choice in what hardware you wanted to run, what OS, what applications, and so on.  The move to close these devices stifles these choices enormously.

Secondly, it is an aggressive attempt to destroy the Open Source Community.  Open Source is one of the primary reasons that PCs have evolved to where they are today, one of the reasons that they have become ubiquitous in the modern world.  Open Source encourages innovation from all comers, it's transparent, and available to entry level technologists at no cost whatsoever, beyond the cost of their hardware.   When I began programming, it was the Open Source Community that allowed me to learn the skills required to advance in the technological world.  I was living as a 'starving artist' at the time, and had the desire but lacked the financial resources to return to college.  The only way I was going to learn these skills was to teach myself.  I scrapped together the money for a book on HTML, borrowed a friends computer, and set out to teaching myself how to make web pages.  From there I went to Javascript, and then to PHP, to XML, to Java and so on.  Over the years I've been able to master several languages, and not once have I had to pay MS or Apple anything more than the cost of a machine with an OEM Operating System.  It's the Open Source Community that allowed the internet to thrive, allowed the dot com boom to happen, and shape the technological landscape we live in today.

That landscape, that openness, is now under threat from the same companies that rose to power because of that openness, and now that they have this power, their obvious goal is to lock out anyone who is unwilling or unable to pay them top dollar for the privilege of running the applications they wrote themselves, or further, applications they want to run by choice.   These companies that started with slogans like "Think Different" and "Where do you want to go today" are now, in effect, saying "Think like we tell you to think" and "You'll go where we damn well tell you to go."

The irony is breathtaking.  It's a classic bait and switch move, made quasi-legal only by the size of the company.  Right now, it's illegal to 'Jailbreak' a smartphone.  Got that?  Illegal. Tablets aren't on the list yet, but they're looking at them, which means it's only a matter of time. And in reality it's not even limited to Apple and Microsoft.  Intel is in on it from the chip side, Dell on the distribution side, and there are even gaming companies taking the "who cares what you think" approach to their products. 

Think about that for a moment.

A company builds up a customer base, the customer's lives become fully-integrated into the company's  products -- that the consumer doesn't own in many cases, then that company closes the gate on the customer and forces them to buy constant upgrades -- and only from said company and their "preferred vendors."  And further, if you don't like it, there are no refunds.

What. The. Hell?

I remember very clearly the first commercial Apple released nationwide:  A black and white Orwellian dystopia, stark and bleak and dismal. Enter an individual in full color, who slings a mace at the old man on the screen doling out the propaganda.  The screen shatters.  "Think Different."

Now that all these people have thought differently, or decided where they wanted to go,  now that they've invested thousands of dollars and countless hours on one OS or another, the gates are being closed so that choice is no longer an option.

Though, all is not lost.  The Open Source Community is still very much alive, and there are still open systems out there.  Linux remains free and open, and Android, despite being peddled by yet another Behemoth, remains open as well, at least for now.  If, however, people don't express themselves and move away from the aforementioned closed systems and migrate towards the open configurations, the gates will be locked,  the barricades raised, and users will be at the mercy of the companies who sold them the hardware, once again at the mercy of Planned Obsolescence.

It's time to think differently about where you want to go today.