As someone who has spent the last decade working in open source, I still really like Apple gear. In fact, I just took delivery on a new iPhone 4 and so far it's been excellent.
I don't do development on my iPhone, so to me it is just another appliance, like a microwave. The reason I got hooked on Apple gear in the first place is that with OS X I got a unix-like base that also had a convenient and well designed GUI. The moment Apple locks down the Mac like they do the iPhone is the moment I leave.
Where do you draw the line? Obviously, iPhone == bad but what about Twitter? On this very page is a link to both Twitter and Identi.ca, but one is much more open source than the other. It seems that for some reason Twitter is okay even though it is closed, but the iPhone crosses some sort of line.
Given a choice between two comparable products, I'll always choose the open one. But for now Android doesn't deliver the same experience as my iPhone does, but it might in 18 months when my contract is up. If so, I'm there, but until then I'll be happy to play with my iPhone but work on Linux.
It's funny you should post this today. I just went and removed quite a bit of content from my Facebook account. I really enjoy the services it provides, but I've decided that I don't want to store much information there.
Of course, I don't have any control on Facebook keeping the pictures I post and things I write without my knowledge, but I never post anything to the Internet (well, at least on a server that I don't 100% control) that I couldn't stand becoming public eventually.
I am interested to see what happens with Diaspora. But with social networks, size does matter. I recently attended a conference in France where I collected about 20 business cards of people with whom I wanted to keep in touch. I looked them both up on LinkedIn and Xing (a popular European alternative). 19 had LinkedIn accounts - none had Xing accounts.
Authored Comments
As someone who has spent the last decade working in open source, I still really like Apple gear. In fact, I just took delivery on a new iPhone 4 and so far it's been excellent.
I don't do development on my iPhone, so to me it is just another appliance, like a microwave. The reason I got hooked on Apple gear in the first place is that with OS X I got a unix-like base that also had a convenient and well designed GUI. The moment Apple locks down the Mac like they do the iPhone is the moment I leave.
Where do you draw the line? Obviously, iPhone == bad but what about Twitter? On this very page is a link to both Twitter and Identi.ca, but one is much more open source than the other. It seems that for some reason Twitter is okay even though it is closed, but the iPhone crosses some sort of line.
Given a choice between two comparable products, I'll always choose the open one. But for now Android doesn't deliver the same experience as my iPhone does, but it might in 18 months when my contract is up. If so, I'm there, but until then I'll be happy to play with my iPhone but work on Linux.
It's funny you should post this today. I just went and removed quite a bit of content from my Facebook account. I really enjoy the services it provides, but I've decided that I don't want to store much information there.
Of course, I don't have any control on Facebook keeping the pictures I post and things I write without my knowledge, but I never post anything to the Internet (well, at least on a server that I don't 100% control) that I couldn't stand becoming public eventually.
I am interested to see what happens with Diaspora. But with social networks, size does matter. I recently attended a conference in France where I collected about 20 business cards of people with whom I wanted to keep in touch. I looked them both up on LinkedIn and Xing (a popular European alternative). 19 had LinkedIn accounts - none had Xing accounts.