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Towards a Permission-Based Web
On his blog over at RedMonk, analyst James Governor looks at the walled garden we seem to be moving into, and possible cracks in the wall. "As we rush to purchase Apple products and services on Cupertino’s monochrome treadmill of shiny shiny, I can’t help thinking the open web community is losing something vital — a commitment to net neutrality and platform openness. If a single company can decide what plays on the network and what does not, in arbitrary fashion, how can that be net neutrality? ... Is the AppStore a neutral network? Should it be? Is Comcast, the company net neutrality proponents love to hate, really the only company we should be wary of? Pipe level neutrality is surely only one layer of a stack. The wider market always chooses proprietary wrappers — every technology wave is co-opted by a master packager. Success in the IT industry has always been about packaging — doing the best job of packaging technologies as they emerge. Twas ever thus." Governor ends his essay with an optimistic look at Android, which he says "potentially fragments The Permission Based Web, and associated data ownership-based business models."
Software service providers have all the rights to lock down their applications and pre. My only beef is when they start pressuring ISPs to do the things at their end in order to save themselves time and effort.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Agreed. His juxtaposition of the mobile and desktop perspectives of net neutrality makes no pragmatic sense. We can still slap anything we want on our desktops and surf anywhere with relatively minimal (if any) meddling from our ISPs.
As a final WTF, he shamelessly shouts out to Android and open source as the answer to society's ills. Guess what people? The average user can't do shit with their phones, Android or otherwise, as long as the telco's are in charge of what goes on them!
Saying that Android is free is like telling people that a chained servant is free*
. *free in his mind, that is.
Your analogy breaks down right there. When I moved from my Treo 600 to an iPhone, I didn't expect to be able to move my apps/games with me. Neither if I moved to a blackberry. Sure there will be some great devs who do cross-platform stuff (PopCap: Bookworm), but that's because they take the time and effort to write it in different platforms
The iPhone is NOT a car. You can't die by using a phone, and the phone industry is not nearly as regulated as the auto industry.
In short, I have NO expectation that I should be able to move my apps from one platform to another, willy-nilly. Maybe if everything was copyleft'd and we were all using ports-capable OS's, sure. But I have no expectation of that any time soon.
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There's this magical thing called "Java". Perhaps you've heard of it?
Haven't we been through this before? Nobody has taken the cross platform capabilities of Java seriously since "All Your Base" jokes went out of style.
Not a typewriter