Jeff Atwood posted an interesting blog entry over at Coding Horror about Freedom Zero. Freedom Zero is the right to run software whenever and wherever you like, for free, forever. It’s the basis of Open Source. It’s also pretty much exactly the opposite of MacOS, which as Jeff points out uses Mac computers has a kind of giant hardware dongle.
You probably think I hate Apple. Well, okay, in some ways I do, but I have to admit their stuff is nice. As long as you treat it like an appliance, to be thrown away after a few years, it’s a very nice platform. Because Mac hardware is locked down so tightly, it becomes similar to a games console system – everything just works. Put in disc, play game. No driver issues, no DirectX upgrades, no minimum hardware specs to worry about.
Mark Pilgrim wrote:
18 months later, Apple has sold 4 million crippled phones, billions of crippled songs, and people are predicting that Mac sales are up 40% year over year. And I wouldn’t bet against their new movie rental venture either.
That pretty much sums up people’s attitudes – they want an appliance, a box that just works and does what it says on the tin. They don’t think about upgrades, or the fact that their phone will probably be a brick in a year’s time, or that their songs probably won’t play in ten years.
I never buy DRM crippled music, I always get a CD. My mum can still play the LPs she bought in 1960, nearly 50 years ago. I want to be able to make a copy for the car, or put the song on my MP3 player. Of course, all this is becoming less important now as P2P eclipses all physical media and the need for backups…
I still think there will be a backlash though. It will just take longer than people expected.