Mashed Articles

Despite being an open-source stalwart, I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve always had something of a love-hate relationship with Apple. In the ’80s, I owned – and still do own – an original Apple IIe along with a real hard drive and two 5.25in floppy drives. It was inherited from the video shop that I worked in, and I put it and its immense customer database to all kinds of nefarious uses. But eventually I moved on to the upland pastures of colour displays, 880kB of storage on a 3.5in disk and four-channel sound. All thanks to Commodore.

In the ’90s, Apple’s expensive and closed hardware meant that an upgrade was never on the cards. This was now the world of Windows, of cheap hardware and modular upgrades. It was the time when Microsoft solidified its dominance, and the time that many of us were looking for a more open alternative. Developing applications on Windows was expensive, especially if you wanted to share the source code. That left us with only one option: Linux. And I’ve never looked back.

But I’ve continued to follow, and occasionally invest in, the progress of Apple, especially in recent years. The move to Intel and a BSD-based operating system has made OS X eminently more hackable, and Linux-
based open-source applications are far easier to build and port to OS X than they are to Windows. This has helped make the venerable MacBook Pro one of the most common laptops in use at open-source and Linux conventions, despite Apple’s obsessive control of the hardware. Apple, for many, has become an acceptable compromise for those who believe in free software but still want a machine that can resume from hibernation without the need to build a custom kernel.

But it’s the iPhone, and now the iPad, that has built a brick wall of division between what most of us are willing to ignore, and what Apple hopes will become their ultimate cash cow. Both are the result of a singular, draconian vision, the antithesis of what the open-source community represents. This isn’t a bad thing in itself, especially when the results leave a lot of free software products wanting. The interfaces of iPhone apps tend to be refined, simple and intuitive. The apps are consistent, responsive and cheap. Our parents could use an iPad without fear of viruses, malware and updates. For almost all the same reasons I’ve been telling them to switch to Linux, they can now switch to Apple for about the same cost.

But doing so is a pact with the devil, because you’re forgoing technical complexity in exchange for loss of freedom. This is the reason for Richard Stallman’s GNU manifesto. And while there’s little doubt that Apple’s enforced gateway to new applications has helped to make it a success, it’s this subtle trade of simplicity for complicity that is perhaps the biggest threat to free software in 10 years.

My fears were proven when Apple recently changed clauses 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 in its developer’s agreement, stopping programmers linking to third-party APIs. Its motivation may have been to halt apps using Adobe’s new Flash-based building tools, but it could also stop applications using open source-based frameworks such as MonoTouch and SDL. Apple refuses to clarify what will and will not be allowed through its vetting procedure. Presumably Electronic Arts games will still be allowed to use the LUA scripting engine, for example, while many independent developers aren’t going to know whether their approach is acceptable until they submit their app for review.

This type of business plan shows the very worst of what closed-source development has to offer, and exactly what open-source software blossomed to combat. But we can’t fight it with rhetoric and positive spin while our hardware and applications aren’t as good as those from closed systems. Public development and public scrutiny should lead to a better, more usable and more stable product. It worked for Linux servers and desktops, but it hasn’t worked for mobile devices yet. This is the challenge for free software developers.

It’s going to be tough, but this point in time probably marks the biggest opportunity for free software to prove its worth. It’s going to be a simple battle between closed, proprietary development on a single platform, and open innovation on open hardware. Open-source developers need to rise to the challenge or face a future that will be closed to collaboration, community and conscience.

What do patents think they are, eh? Coming in here, hoarding all our perfectly shareable technologies, talking in a barely understandable language of their own, eh? It’s terrible! They’re holding this fine country of ours back 20 years! What next? Shall we patent the act of purchasing a product using money so they can take over our retail establishments too? Even better, let us patent the act of drawing air into meaty sacks using a diaphragm! That’s sure to be a money-spinner. I’m not a filthy patentist, of course. No. I think they should be allowed to live. They just ought to keep quiet and stay in the patent office where they belong.

These patent / immigrant jokes doing it for you? Thought not.

In among the nonsense, I’m making a vaguely serious point: patents and the stupid legal squabbling that goes with them are holding technology back like a playground bully stunts the emotional growth of an awkward nerd. Look at Apple’s public and obviously duplicitous fight with HTC. To the cynical outsider it seems to have nothing to do with patents at all. Apple is barking and growling, its attitude based solely on professional malice, baring its teeth against any other manufacturer that dares sniff around the territory urine-marked as Apple’s own. It picks on HTC because a fight with bull mastiff Google might not end altogether pleasantly. I could understand a measure of stroppiness if the iPhone UI were being ripped off wholesale, but interface elements like multitouch control simply should not be reserved for a single company. They’re fundamentals. They are base functions that will help carry computing into the next decade. They’re the glue that holds mobile devices together. If these things have been put together from scratch, with none of the originating code, the fact that they do a similar job is irrelevant to me. It’s just healthy competition, isn’t it?

What if someone litigious held the patent for the keyboard? Or how about the ‘finger-based input device’? I would hope that a court would bash their unreasonable claims for dominance down, but I can’t be sure that they would.

I note with interest that snarling Apple isn’t yet spitting venom at Microsoft over the patents which are no doubt infringed upon in Windows Mobile 7, perhaps because WM7 isn’t yet on the shelves. An early pre-release battle will lead to a subtle change in technology, not a hefty and embarrassing payout, which I’m not sure is the desired result of all this.

Lest you accuse me of unfairly picking on Apple (again), let me remind you that this sort of thing has happened before. In 2002 BT exhumed from its vault a crumbling, dusty patent for the hyperlink, the fundamental building block of the internet. It then loaded its cannon and fired a lawyer at the broadside of ailing ISP Prodigy, presumably as a test case prior to levying a hyperlink tax on the entire internet. The case was dismissed, luckily, on the grounds that the exact text of BT’s patent didn’t match the exact use of the hyperlink in the field, but the antisocial and anti-competitive precedent set has carried forward, and it’s not likely to die out.

I am aware that my opinion makes something of a mockery of the patent system. Yes, there’s a very strong case to be made for protecting intellectual property in this day and age, and I do think the inventors of excellent things deserve a shred of market advantage. But let’s all just play nice, shall we?

Windows 7 is 234 per cent more popular than its predecessor. It’s official. OK, so that figure relates to the first few days of sales in the US, and the predecessor in question is Windows Vista, the Antichrist OS. Even so, pathologically mediocre as it may well be, Windows 7 has been well received.

What interests me is how this reflects a broader malaise that continues to blight the PC industry. What else but Microsoft’s ongoing near-monopoly can explain the continued success of an operating system that sports a near-total absence of real innovation?

The broader problem, therefore, involves the fact that the key components inside your PC, both software and hardware, are still owned by far too few companies. In just about any other industry of global import, the way Microsoft dominates the software landscape while Intel has the hardware platform largely sewn up and Google owns web searches would be viewed as unhealthy.

A handy analogue is the food industry in the US. If you’ve seen the recent documentary Food, Inc., you’ll know what I’m talking about. According to the film’s makers, key sectors in the US food industry have been whittled down from around 20 major players in the 1970s to just four mega-producers today. The result has been the emergence of a range of seriously unsavoury practices – the concentration of power in the hands of a handful of massive companies hasn’t done anyone any good. Except those companies, of course.

Compare that to the PC industry and, if anything, the concentration of power looks much, much worse. It’s a fact that both Microsoft and Intel, for example, have recently been subject to prosecutions for market abuses. But a plausible argument can still be made in terms of the benefits to the PC industry and end users. Together, Intel and Microsoft provided developers with a single, unified platform and a massive customer base. Thus was born the astonishing ecosystem of PC-compatible applications and devices we take for granted today.

Moreover, I suppose we should all be grateful for what little competition there has been. Without AMD and ATI to keep Intel and Nvidia honest, for instance, we might now be marvelling at the power of single-core Intel Pentium 5 processors and Nvidia GeForce 4900 TI graphics.

Similarly, I scarcely dare imagine what horrors the Beast of Redmond would have sired were it not for the threat, however remote, of Apple’s OS X and the open-source Linux operating system.

So, a lot of power and wealth may have been accumulated in the hands of a few thanks to the Wintel monopoly, but mankind has benefited enormously from the emergence of ubiquitous personal computing.

Still, if I’m convinced it’s all been worth it up to now, I’m equally sure the time has come for a more democratic wave of innovation. Fortunately, there are signs it’s already happening. Microsoft is increasingly under siege from all conceivable angles, whether it’s the success of Linux as an enterprise OS or the arguably even more lethal threat posed by the humble web browser. Who needs a complex operating system if all your applications are hosted online?

Intel’s hardware nut seems trickier to crack. Creating computer chips is a complex business – the idea of new entrants to the market is virtually inconceivable. However, the increasing importance of mobile devices might be the key. Currently, ultra-mobile computing is dominated not by Intel chips but by ARM’s processor architectures.
Crucially, ARM’s approach to producing CPUs is rather novel. In fact, ARM doesn’t really produce processors at all. Rather, it licenses out designs. This gives chipmakers the option of simply knocking out an off-the-shelf design or fusing an ARM processor architecture with its own technology to create something unique. As the remit for ultra-mobile devices expands over the next few years, so will the range and ability of ARM-based processors. Chips with all kinds of enhanced functions, from video decoding to cryptography acceleration, are likely to appear.

Intel recognises the threat posed by a plethora of purpose-built ARM processors and so has taken the bold step of licensing out the Atom processor architecture to TSMC, one of its main rivals in the chip production business. Again, the idea is to allow the Atom core to be combined with a range of third-party circuitry.

All of which means we’re poised for a battle royal between ARM and Intel in the ultra-mobile segment. Google, meanwhile, might just provide a similar foil for Microsoft. The result would be a perfect storm of hardware and software innovation. If that happens, the mediocrity of Windows 7 will be but a distant memory.