Charles Curley's Weblog

The Best Argument for Linux

Mac, no; Linux yes. (Wikipedia via Salon)

There are any number of arguments one can make for Linux. Technical superiority. Security. etc. But there is a much deeper one, which Slate's Dan Gillmor articulates as follows:

Apple is pushing computer users as fast as it can toward a centrally controlled computing ecosystem where it makes all the decisions about what native applications may be used on the devices it sells -- and takes a cut of every dollar that is spent inside that ecosystem. This is a direct repudiation of its own history, and more broadly that of the larger personal-computing ecosystem, where no one can stop anyone else from writing and distributing software that other people might want to use.

Steve Jobs says Apple is a curator, nothing more. This grossly understates the control. Jobs says Apple has "made mistakes" in being the police, judge, jury and executioner in its Disney-style world, and is working hard to perfect the system.

But this is a disconnect with reality. Central control, no matter how well-intentioned, is itself the problem, not the solution. The "enlightened dictator" is fiction. And dangerous.

"[A] direct repudiation of its own history…", indeed. Recall that the Apple II was an open system. The peripheral connectors were documented. The OS was well documented. Anyone could and did write software for the thing. Your correspondent ported Forth to it. Apple competed with S-100 bus computers, which were, if anything, even more open. What killed both of them off was time, technological growth, and the IBM PC, another very open product.

The first Macs were closed boxes. No expansion slots, and no choice in operating systems. The IBM PC competed rings around it, which Apple effectively admitted when they added NuBus expansion slots and later went to Intel's PCI bus.

The PC was so open that IBM lost control of the thing, and smaller, nimbler, more innovative companies out-competed IBM in a market IBM created. IBM's attempt at a command-and-control ecology, the PS2, failed so miserably that you can be forgiven for thinking that "PS2" stands for "Play Station 2".

It will be interesting to follow Mr. Gillmor's adventures. But I wonder if he will apply the lesson more broadly, from computer and software markets to whole economies.