"He said he was concerned about the rise of relatively restrictive smartphones, at the expense of PCs or Macs. ‘One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it. That’s kind of important to me, and that’s also kind of important to the whole future of the internet … obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation.’
He is most worried by moves by some makers of laptop operating systems to ‘lock those down too, because they like the environment of the locked-down phone". He said such limited operating systems could improve security but "on the other hand this is the end of the road for the general innovative space which is general computers.’"
I’m starting to worry that computers as we know them could soon be much harder to come by, which would affect people like us who like to develop software, or at least enjoy the products of hobbyist programmers. I wondered if anyone here had any thoughts on this.
he should be more worried that most apps for iOS are actually web pages converted into native apps for “convenience”. That’s right, years of efforts into building an open, cross-platform interface derailing back into native apps for some closed platform…
Anyone had a look at Windows 8 yet? It looks very similar for laptops and for smartphones. I dearly hope that doesn’t mean that this is actually going to happen.
Android is open source though. The main reason I didn’t get an iphone is apple’s closed nature.
Android is at best semi-open. Partly because many apps that would be hard to do without are closed, and also because the manufacturers add a whole bunch of extra stuff too. If it was fully open source it’d be so much easier to update to Android 4. Well. So I’d hope.
