| In the 90s, if I wanted to release a game through the mail or whatever means, I was on equal grounds as everyone else. Remember that Doom was just a shareware game passed around through the mail primarily. Today, if you want to write a game for a major platform (ie: iOS), you basically have to get the permission from Apple. Put a confederate flag in a civil war game? Grounds for termination. http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/25/technology/apple-pulls-civil... Feel like writing a Bitcoin wallet for iOS? Grounds for termination. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2095060/apple-removes-blockch... You can only write applications today if the platform holder agrees with your purpose. How the heck is this better than the 90s, when you were allowed to write whatever you wanted and anyone was allowed to install? You may think things are improving, but if things keep going in this direction of the "walled garden", I really don't think they're better. At least the Windows Win32 platform is still relatively open for games / applications. But everything else is basically run by an integrated store now: iOS, Android (Google Play). |
The Play Store is relatively free. If anything, at least you can access the Android filesystem so if you so wished, you could install an .apk outside of Google's ecosystem. Jesus.
And that's just mobile. In the desktop and web environment, platforms are super-open. You can pretty much distribute any .exe or .app you'd like on your website and it's the user's fault if he ends up downloading a virus. Furthermore, you can write your webserver code in literally anything you want. There are CGI scripts for C if you were really that insane. I'm pretty sure someone out there has figured out how to turn a physical Turing tape machine into something that generates HTML and CSS templates.
Your templates end up having to have some JavaScript in them, I guess, but even then. JS is still open-source, and it's ended up being more of a target language than it is a programming language these days.