Michael Dolan Dot Com

Saturday, June 24th, 2006

Apple takes some open source backlash

Apple’s taking some heat over their closed/private/proprietary (insert “not open source” antithesis here) approach to software and their desktop technology. I have to admit… I’ve come to pretty much the same conclusions over the year. I’m actually writing this from my brand new Ubuntu setup – yes, my 4th Linux OS in recent months (I’m on a Linux tour… so it seems). I enjoy trying out the different Linux distros every now and then just to see what little tweaks, polishes, and innovative features they throw in. While it’s been say… well a LONG time since I last ran Debian on a desktop/client, I must admit I’m shocked at the simplistic, stable, and really polished approach Mark has taken with Ubuntu. I met him a little over a year ago and he had asked why I chose Gentoo for my desktop – he wasn’t trying to push Ubuntu, but rather he was innately curious as to what features/functionality drove me to pick the platform. That curiousity has led to a very nice distro.
Anyway, as I’m going through a tour of distros like Henry VIII went through wives, I am living out a disaster recovery type situation … every few weeks. I have to ensure I have backed up my data (email, docs, pictures, etc) but most important is that the new platform I choose to install (could be Vista beta soon) must be able to accept the format that I’ve backed up my data. Over time I think things like POP3 mail will go away – we’ll get to a “grid” like data availability with online access becoming ubiquitous in the next 5-10 years. But to get there – we need open file formats, standards, and the ability to support new and old generations of data formats.

And so Apple seems to be taking a hit. I first read about the controversy at Stephen’s tecosystems which seems to have spread to the masses a couple days later at eWeek here. It all started on Mark Pilgrim’s blog posting “When the Bough Breaks” about his concerns with Apple’s approach to closed formats and data access. It will be interesting to see how this plays out – Apple’s had to respond to open source community “issues” before – but they were never a direct attack on its corporate approach to … well everything.

Could this be the “shot heard round the world”?

It’s a monsoon in NYC right now… guess I had a bit more creative time on this post ;)