Submitted by Jim Bray, who played a major role in the XML standardisation effort, has joined Google to work on Android, and his words for the iPhone are pretty harsh. “The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it.”
… any working programmer who doesn’t want to be a serf should be very nervous about the App Store model. Let’s say that Apple prevails in the market, and prevails in its legal battles. Laptops are mostly replaced by iPads and similar tools except for a niche market of power users. No one else can make a usable smart phone because of Apple’s patent portfolio; the courts rule that Nokia’s patents are all accessible There’s only one place in the world to get any software to run on your device, and Apple takes 30% off the top. Furthermore, any software innovation that hurts their business model in any way, or that offends Steve’s sense of style, is dropped from the store and there is no appeal.
Compared to such a world, a Microsoft-dominated would would be infinitely preferable.
Now, there are some advantages to the App Store model, in that malware would have to be smuggled past the App Store reviewers and can be traced. However, it’s likely that some app, or the OS itself, will have an exploitable bug that would allow iPads/iPhones to be infected via the web or something.
Well, I am sorry Apple didn’t got bankrupt a few years ago. The more time goes, the more they spread like an infection. Idiotic patents, idiotic lawsuits, malefic market practices.
Compared to Apple, MS is a saint.
By contrast, Google loves controversy, sex and apps of every kind.
It just wants to know exactly what apps you’re running, exactly what kind of sex you like, and everything you know related to every controversy…
The difference is you’re not tied to Google.
You can run Android and not use Google’s search engine.
Google might want to record your every movement, but they also believe in freedom of choice – and if people choose to use Bing, Altavista, Ask, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Firefox, Opera, Windows or Linux instead of Google, G-Mail, Chrome and Chrome OS, then people still can.
Personally I use Android but didn’t like the idea of Google owning my e-mails so I use my own mail server and POP/SMTP from my handset.
Where as Apple don’t give users freedom. They take peoples freedom away in the name of “progress” and efficiency.
In this day and age, nothing is private – regardless of which search engine you use. This is particularly true of people who frequent social network sites, message boards and even news forums like these.
Privacy is one aspect of our lives we’ve already given up.
So I’d rather not give up freedom alongside privacy.
Because at least with freedom, you have /some/ control over your data rather than none.
Hmm.. And how does this relate to the recently launched Google app-store (or cloud-store)?
You don’t have to use Google’s app store either.
How do you get your address book and calendar on an Android phone without going through the Google cloud of domination?
Who says you need to get them from Google?
I used vcard (ie that address book / contact standard that existed long before android) to load my contacts and don’t use the calendar as I have 3rd party apps I use for reminders (though I use them more because I need a slightly different functionality from a calendar than because I refuse to use Google’s own inbuilt)
Don’t get me wrong, Google is far from perfect either. without building your own handset from scratch, there will be no such thing as a perfect solution.
But Google is a better product than Apple when it comes to freedoms.
I doubt that most freedom fighters activities are worth the fuel to power the black helicopters that are supposedly following these folks in the first place.
Assuming your comment is intending to follow on from my discussion about Apple: you’re confusing two issues.
When we talk about freedom (particularly in the case of Apple), we talk about the ability to use our devices the way we want to use them with the application we want to use and so on.
Unless I’ve completely mistaken the meaning behind the slang of “black helicopter” – those kind of tin foil theories are irrelevent when talking about freedoms and Apple.
The freedom I talk about is a very real issue and one that’s already reared it’s ugly head in IT over the years (it’s one of the many reasons Microsoft have been a dominant force)
What you’re talking about is privacy – and that is a potential threat of which the significance has yet to be realised.
We don’t yet know how serious the ramifications are for the level of personal detail we give away for free. Maybe nothing major will occur beyond a few shocking headlines – maybe more.
However, with proper freedoms (as described above), we can choose how we want to expose ourselves online. Without those freedoms, we’re not only forced to use a product the way we perhaps might not prefer, but we also have little control over our privacy too.
This is why I consider Google the less of two evils out of them and Apple.
1stly it’s not recently launched – Google’s app store has been out nearly 2 years now.
2ndly you can install apps outside of the app store. In fact, you don’t ever need to use the app store if you’re willing to find and download the apps yourself
“The difference is you’re not tied to Google.
You can run Android and not use Google’s search engine.”
Hmm, I don’t think it’s as nice as you’re saying. Okay, it’s not as bad as Apple, but for example, try using Android and syncing contacts with a Google account which isn’t a Gmail account – it doesn’t work.
Admittedly I’ve not tried any of them, but there’s plenty of sync-ing apps on the market ranging from facebook to outlook.
I don’t need to sync my calendar and my contacts are just backed up via vcard sporadically.
As I’m not somebody who uses clouds much (be it Google or otherwise), I must admit I’ve not needed to do what you’ve described aside keeping my e-mails synced with my own mail server (which is easy with POP/SMTP)
Android’s calendar is open source, as are its Sync interfaces.
So either you (or someone) can build a Provider to sync the calendar via CalDAV (or whatever you wants), or adapt the calendar app to use some protocol directly, in case the Provider interface is unusable, for example because it’s too closely tied to the way Google’s services work.
The same applies to contacts.
Sure, we could. Would Google take the patch? Hard to say. Android may be open source, but it doesn’t run like most open source projects. Have you tried filing an issue in Google’s tracker? If you ever get any response from inside Google, consider yourself lucky.
If the Provider interface is good enough, that isn’t necessary. Just put the .apk with your new provider somewhere for others to download.
If the Provider interface is not good enough, put the replacement Calendar app’s .apk somewhere for others to download.
You’re not forced to have your code delivered by Google, and that’s the good thing about Android.
Of course it would be nice if Android were a real community effort. Until then, the quite complete API (in terms of Android features made available for the developer) is something you won’t easily find on other mobile operating systems, except maybe PalmOS.
“You’re not forced to have your code delivered by Google, and that’s the good thing about Android.”
Not in this case, it’s not. Sure, the fact that you can deliver apps aside from the Marketplace is great, don’t get me wrong. But the point is, Google should accept patches to improve core functionality. The existence of K9Mail, for instance, is silly: the enhancements in K9Mail should have been taken upstream into the Google mail app long ago.
Same applies to the silly omissions from Google’s calendar / tasks sync code; Google should take fixes so they become part of the upstream code base and benefit all users, it’s nowhere near as good for improvements to be only available through a third-party source.
At least they don’t censor it. Yet.
After years of just being a critic, Tim recently put himself in the software patent abolition camp:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Tim_Bray_on_software_patents
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Google
Come back after he’s been working for Google where hundreds of patents get filed for software. It’s called personal hypocrisy as neither Sun nor Google has ever been against Software Patents and he knows part of his job is to write software patents or he doesn’t have a job.
The title says Tim, the article says Jim!
A case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
Drama.
it just got personal on both sides