| I hope you realize that it's not hard to come up with other examples of technology that is not 'open' in any way, yet could be used for malicious or undesirable purposes, right? Sure. And if I could, I'd buy open versions of them too. mean, I love open-source and everything, but I honestly don't give a sh_t whether the 'firmware' of the plane I'm flying, the playback device and amplifier pumping out my tunes, the microwave oven that heats my lasagna, the ECU controlling my cars engine or the software in my satnav system is 'open' and 'free'. Well, then we're different. I give a shit. Not enough to refuse to use a closed version, of course. For probably around 99.9% of all people using cell-phones, the exact same reasoning holds for how they think about them, and how they would prefer it to just work well and have more functionality, instead of carrying this (to them) abstract notion of being 'open'. If 'closed' means they get a better product (which is very often the case), then closed is better for them. Possibly. But that still leaves 0.1% of people. And that includes me. And 'better' is hard to tell. How much money and effort was spent rewriting stuff because it was tied to closed platforms?
People are usually bad at looking at the long term or at evaluating the far reaching consequences of such decisions, in my opinion. |