| Thursday, July 17, 2008 |
19:39 - You will have saved the lives of millions of registered voters
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/5-reasons-to-avoid-iphone-3g
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Wouldn't you know it: Apple is the new Microsoft—and the new Standard Oil, the new DeBeers, the new East India Company.
"This is the phone that has changed phones forever," Mr. Jobs said.
We agree. A snake oil salesman not satisfied with his business of pushing proprietary software and Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology into your home, Jobs has set his sights on getting DRM and proprietary software into your pocket as well.
Yeah, that's his nefarious scheme, the end short of which he'll never stop: forcing us all to accept DRM. Because DRM isn't a means to an end (e.g. making money); it's an end in itself.
And wasn't the concept of "snake oil" a reference to something that didn't work as advertised?
There is a reason so much emphasis was put on the visual design of the iPhone. There is a reason that Apple is so concerned about unsightly seams that they won't even let you change the battery in your own phone.
And everyone just wails and gnashes their teeth over their inability to change their batteries.
Unfortunately, we are not. The extreme here is represented by Jobs and Apple. The iPhone is an attack on very old and fundamental values -- the value of people having control over their stuff rather than their stuff having control over them, the right to freely communicate and share with others, and the importance of privacy.
And the right not to have to pay a toll when you walk on the sidewalk, right? Right.
Apple's DRM system monitors your activities and tells you what you are and are not allowed to do. What you are not allowed to do is install any software that Apple doesn't like. This restriction prevents you from installing free software -- software whose authors want you to freely share, copy and modify their work.
You mean they get to dictate the terms by which you can use their service? Fie!
You can crack the iPhone and install whatever you can get to run on it, sure; and then feel free to bitch when your warranty is no longer honored, updates don't work, and you can't get any software that actually runs from the App Store.
Free software has given us many exciting things on the desktop -- the GNU/Linux operating system, the Firefox web browser, the OpenOffice.org suite, the Apache webserver that runs most of the web sites on the internet. Why would we want to buy a computer that goes out of its way to obstruct the freedom of such creators?
I love how they could only think of two examples of free "desktop" software before listing, uh, Apache.
I'm also reminded of the scene a few years ago in front of an Apple Store opening. Some old guy was walking past, saw the huge line, and asked nobody in particular what it was. Someone said it was for the new Apple Store. The guy looked nonplussed, and said, "Who'd want to buy an Apple?"
Um, all these people.
"Why would we want to buy a computer that" does all this vile stuff? Be... cause... it works?
But it's been a year and a half since Jobs, under pressure from the public, spoke out strongly against DRM and in favor of freedom. With great hesitation, he allowed a handful of files to go DRM-free on iTunes, but kept in place the requirement that they be purchased using the proprietary, DRM-infected iTunes software. Since then, he has done absolutely nothing to act on those words. In his movie and video ventures, he has continued to push DRM. And now he's bringing it to mobile software applications as well. It's become clear that those words were a ploy to defuse opposition.
Oh, yeah, it's his fault that nobody but EMI has opened up their libraries for iTunes Plus. It's his fault that the movie distributors won't allow their material to be bought or rented without a mechanism for enforcing playback rights. And it's unreasonable that you be required to buy iTunes music through, well, iTunes. Which, by the way, will happily catalog and play and sync any music you rip from CD or download from EMusic or get in MP3 or AIFF or whatever format from wherever. But no, no Ogg Vorbis, so no cookie, I guess.
These are people for whom MP3 is too encumbered, I have to keep reminding myself.
The truth is that there are thousands of software, music, and media creators who want to share their work more freely. It's funny -- as in reprehensible -- because Apple's OS X operating system was in fact largely built on software written by people who voluntarily made their work free to others for further copying, modification and improvement. When people have the freedom to tinker, create, and innovate, they make exciting and useful creations. People have already been writing their own free software to run mobile platforms. The telephone network is still standing.
Yes, it's built on software that was written under licenses less hollow-cheeked and muttering mad than the GPL, like the BSD and Apache licenses, which allow it to be freely incorporated into closed-source, for-profit products. The developers in question did this on purpose. Turns out that having corporate sponsorship dollars and telephony infrastructure behind you lets you make even more exciting and useful creations.
We know Jobs is afraid of competition, and is manufacturing threats and excuses. This is simply a business decision, and it's a kind of business we shouldn't support. Jobs wants the iPhone to restrict you because he wants your money and increased control is a means to that -- he wants to take as much from you as possible, give you back as little as possible, and keep his costs at the absolute minimum. He's trying to make sure that nobody writes software for the iPhone to do things that he doesn't want the iPhone to be able to do -- such software might make FoulPlay less foul, play alternative media formats, show the user exactly what's being communicated from the phone to the people monitoring it, or even disable transmission of that information.
Or, perhaps, nobody cares what they can't do with the iPhone, because they're all too busy enjoying what they can.
Damn sheeple!
But this, this is the best part. This is where this veritable sonnet of navel-gazing paranoia undergoes its volta and offers us a grand alternative vision:
Fortunately, we will soon be able to have all the convenience of a mobile computer that also makes phone calls without selling our freedom to Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, or anyone else. The Neo FreeRunner is a promising free-software phone, being developed in cooperation with the same worldwide community responsible for the GNU/Linux operating system. These are creators who want to share their work and who want you and others to be able to do what they did -- build on the work of people who came before them to make new, empowering devices.
Jobs built on the work of people before him too, only his answer is to kick away the ladder and try to prevent anyone else from doing what he did. His customers are fighting back -- according to Apple in October 2007, over 250,000 of the 1.4 million iPhones sold were unlocked by their users. Rather than embracing this, Jobs thinks it should be stopped.
We have a choice. The FreeRunner doesn't yet do as much as the iPhone and it's certainly not as pretty. But in terms of potential, the fact that it's supported by a worldwide community of people rather than a single greedy, dishonest and secretive entity puts it light-years ahead. We can trade our freedom and our money to get something flashy on the surface, or we can spend a little more money, keep our freedom, and support a better kind of business. If we want businesses to be ethical, we have to reward the ones that are. By not enriching companies that want to take away our freedom and by rewarding those that respect us, we will be helping to bring about a better future.
Go... go and hit the link to see the picture. I'm laughing too hard to embed an image here.
Can you even imagine? It took Apple with its willingness to break the logjam of bad smartphone interfaces in order to make a platform that people were actually willing to write good apps for, and this is going to show people the error of their ways, tear the veils from their faces, shake them from their hypnosis? This is what people would voluntarily carry around in their pockets and play Mah-Jongg on?
What iTunes sells is a promise of quality. That's the concept behind the App Store as much as it is behind the DRM-locked (and non-DRM'd iTunes Plus) music and video in the library: it's all organized properly and guaranteed to work. You don't have to do any of that tedious crap yourself.
And that's the division at work here: on one hand are the people who don't have time to do bookkeeping and quality control and who just want their technology to work, even if they have to pay a little more for it; and on the other, there are the people who actually enjoy it when things don't work quite right. Because then there's something to do, some mess to clean up, some Makefile to tinker with, some dependency to sort out, some angry Pravda editorial to write. And where would the world be without those?
I can't believe I once seriously considered listening to these men.
Via Gruber.
UPDATE: J Greely goes for the pithy one-liner, much like the Kung-Fu Master of yore.
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Brian Tiemann
1. Lileks - 22:47 Thu 7/17/2008 ( email | web )
Tonight I bought the "Dark Knight" soundtrack on iTunes. Put it on my iPods. ITunes asked if I wanted to *make a copy* for backup purposes; I did so, knowing I could, if so deviously inclined, strip out the DRM using evil juju and make a copy I could use if all my Macs and my Time Capsule drive and my backup drives were demolished by a meteor, and the only computer left in the world was a homebrew box running last Tuesday's flavor of an open-source OS. But I had other things to do. Now I'm off to watch a DVD on my government-approved player, because if I ripped my Mad Men DVD and shipped it to the AppleTV, the Jobs-approved detection chip would cause the unit to burst into flames.
Also, my iPhone 3G is sending messages to the CIA about my bowel movements through the radio. And it's LYING.