Have Walled Gardens Killed the Personal Computer?

theodp writes "Harvard Law School Prof Jonathan Zittrain explains in The Personal Computer is Dead why you should be afraid — very afraid — of the snowballing replicability of the App Store Model. 'If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens,' warns Zittrain, 'we'll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we'll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.' Searchblog's John Battelle, who's also solidly in the tear-down-this-walled-garden camp, adds: 'I'm not a nerd, quite, but I'm sure angry.'"

Comments

Ego-centric much?

[gottspeed]

So this egg-head whose allowed apple to set up shop in his temporal lobe thinks he speaks for the millions of people world-wide that use computers for things other than maps, songs, and making fart or chainsaw noises? This is cheesecake for self absorbed children.

Re:Well duh.

[BitZtream]

No, it doesn't mean you can distribute it yourself.

See thats the thing, these 'free and open' licenses you refer of are typically nothing of the sort and the end result is that the user gets NO software at all because the license prevents anyone other than the author (who isnt' bound by the license) from publishing it.

Re:Well duh.

[BitZtream]

Authors are not bound be the license of their own software, so using the license of their software as an excuse is pretty much just a bullshit excuse to do exactly the opposite (supposedly) of the intention of the license they choose and prevent users from using their software. Its an example of not-open censorship at its greatest.

I don't agree with the company you choose to buy your products from so you can't have mine even though I claim to be OPEN and FREE (as in liberty)

The link you posted is utter bullshit. Most of the dependancies DO exist (I know, I've looked at porting it myself) with ports already, the others are hard to port (couple exceptions) and they'd need to make a new UI. Its really not that hard, except ... when you read that ticket you see the actual truth ... they don't want to play nice with Apple users, but their using GPL as an excuse.

They don't give a flying fuck about free and open, they just want to 'stick it to the man', if you can't see that you need to open your eyes to the world.

Re:The major reason why apple store is public enem

[BitZtream]

The author of the code can do whatever he/she wants with it. If you release code under GPL ... YOU as the AUTHOR can also release it under BSD, proprietary, and any other style of license you want ...

The AUTHOR IS NOT BOUND BY THE LICENSE, so saying 'the license prevents me from publishing to Apple's store' is a 100% bullshit excuse.

GPL software (cause lets face it, its only GPL zealots that we're talking about here) won't die because of AppStores, it'll die because you idiots are too stupid to survive. If you all want to relegate yourself to obscurity, thats your fault, no one elses.