Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 31st May 2007 07:28 UTC
At the D5 conference yesterday evening (CET), an historic joint interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates took place. They were interviewed by the WSJ's Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Gates: "I admire Steve's taste. And that's not a joke." Jobs: "We've kept our marriage secret for over a decade now." You can find transcripts of the unscripted event here and here, while the AllThingsD website has started posting segments in video of the event as well.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
I think that rapid change is a friend of free software and an enemy of big, lumbering proprietary vendors. Unless these vendors are the ones responsible for driving the change, that is. And as we've seen in various ultra-mobile form factors, these vendors have a tough time unilaterally pushing the market to new ideas. The AppleTV is a great device that's been slammed in the media for its highly limited software.
Your sense of how the free software community would interact with such devices isn't quite right. There's a clear chicken and egg problem with releasing a new device without basic software support. The device vendor would obviously ship the units with a decent foundation developed in-house. Then the community would elaborate to make the platform more useful. The point is that a vendor that opens its platform to community development is going to produce a more compelling product than one that closes the platform and shoulders the burden themselves.
If the device vendor doesn't go the free software route from the beginning, then what you say is true, and a free software alternative will come too late. But vendors will increasingly choose to build their platforms on free software, and they'll eventually open their platforms to community development. The community can't just step in and make it so. The vendors have to want an open platform.
For example, a major reason why Linux smartphones haven't been much more successful is because none of them have an open, native development platform. The result is devices that are (supposedly) good enough, rather than ones that are as good as they can be.
By the way, 4-month-old proprietary applications are no better than 4-month-old free software applications and probably worse. The difference is that proprietary vendors don't release early alpha versions. This is more a symptom of "release early, release often" than it is a symptom of resource shortage. Distributors will insulate average users from underdeveloped software. But these are diamonds in the rough for developers and hobbyists.