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> This is the most telling quote in the article. Companies took over computing by locking down Cell Phones.

It's interesting to remember why this was possible/accepted. As I recall, at the time of its release, the iPhone's App Store was a breath of fresh air compared to software stores on traditional cell phones that were often tightly controlled by carriers and featured prices that were outrageous even by 2007 standards. For example, I remember a very crappy breakout clone being sold for ~$20 on my Nokia flip phone.

So in a weird way, cell phones weren't "locked down", they were "freed up" relative to what had come before. However, as cell phones became the primary computing platform for a generation of people the restrictions didn't lift to the point where cell phones were on par with traditional PCs and instead we've been stuck with this "good enough" situation of a mostly locked down platform with a few workarounds (side loading APKs, TestFlight) for people that really need them.

I blame a lack of competition. There has been no viable competitor to the Android/iOS duopoly since Microsoft gave up on the Windows phone. And certainly no one with the marketing chops to turn a technological advantage like "open platform" into a killer feature that would get the masses to buy in.

I have a clear memory that, at the time, cellphone carriers were adamant about strictly controlling how their networks were used. If anything but voice or SMS crossed their network, they wanted to be bribed to permit it. The surprising coup was Apple getting them to admit a device with such flexibility onto their network.

Then Google finished the job; side-loading was no longer "jailbreaking", it was directly supported, and programming on the device wasn't prohibited. I'm not the customer for an iPhone, I really doubt they'd ever open up so that iPhone owners could install an open source app store (f-droid), and from that a full development environment (termux), within which you can install a bigger distro (Debian) to install e.g. Calibre for ebook-reformatting. Or git, or LaTeX, or rust, or emacs.

We used to do hacky stuff on Windows Mobile pre iPhone.

My first streaming setup basically used SSH to control my MPD server but it worked.

>I do not use MAC/OS, but to get your application in the MAC store, do you need to pay a fee or give a cut if you sell it ? I suspect you do, or where else would Microsoft get their Ideas from.

Buying a product from the manufacturer and selling it at a markup to end-users is called "retail sales" and is a concept that predates software by a few years.

Most times, those "stores" you mention within Linux are just graphical frontends for package managers, nothing more than that.

This is such a dangerous way to look at this; this is exactly the sort of thinking that makes these bad ideas happen.

You're saying that making something more comfortable for new users is the same as marching towards a walled garden? Linux has been criticized for decades about its inaccessibility to the masses. I'm about as hardcore a Linux guy as they come, and were it not for these sort of improvements, I'm not sure my wife and kids would have been willing to use Linux on all of our home computers. And as much as some people complain about the GPL license, it has been remarkably useful in keeping Linux free from corporate take over.

>but to get your application in the MAC store

You do not need to put your app on the store. Macs come free with Xcode and always have since OS X was released and you can compile and run whatever you want. You can sign code without submitting to the App Store if you really care.

Macs are friendly to normies, but that doesn't mean you can't tinker with them. You can. They are like an iOS device and a UNIX system and everything in between, not only one or the other.

The day they start making you jailbreak a Mac is the day I move to linux, but until then, most of what you hear about them are just bs from people who've never used one.

The biggest threat to Linux, BSD and other alternative operating systems is that there will be no hardware available to run it on if all hardware will be specialized to closed down systems, and this is not only for motherboards but also memory, storage, video cards as well.

If number of potential users of alternative operating system is less than 1 percent, then that hardware will never be produced.

This is my perception as well, and the direction of Linux development of late (such as systemd) offers no comfort.

I am in the process of moving all of my machines away from Linux and to BSD as a result of this trend.

Linux has been compatible with Secure Boot for years now.

You say this like it is a good thing :)

I think if Linux refused to support secure boot and paying M/S for keys, I think we would be in a better place.

https://www.omglinux.com/boot-linux-modern-lenovo-thinkpads-...

>Walled Garden

Walled Garden is marketing speak. "Closed Ecosystem" is more objective(neutral) and doesn't have positive words associated with it.

We should avoid using marketing speak.

Marketing by whom? Why do you get to decide what is marketing speak and what isn’t? Why does closed ecosystem work better? Why is “walled” more positive than “closed”, or “garden” more positive than “ecosystem”? And finally, why are some people so absolutely obsessed with the idea that the words we use to describe things have such mystical and overwhelming power?

>why are some people so absolutely obsessed with the idea that the words we use to describe things have such mystical and overwhelming power?

Because it does.

Politicians and marketers all dress up their words.

If it didn't we wouldnt have marketing departments or speech writers. Are you denying word choice doesnt matter at all?

Garden is clearly a happier, more inviting, prettier, and nicer place to be than an ecosystem. A garden is in your backyard at home, full of healthy fruits and pretty flowers. Ecosystem? Could be a petri disk of bacteria or the entire earth. Heck, you can google/chatgpt the definition of these two and find out which has a more positive perception.

We are animals at our core, garden drives warm emotion, ecosystem doesnt.

Interesting. I think that the connotations these phrases have to you are very different than the connotations they have to me.

To me, the meaningful part of "walled garden" isn't the "garden" part, it's the "walled" part. It's like "gilded cage" -- the important part of that is "cage", not "covered in gold". "Gilded", like "garden", in these contexts, implies deception to me.

But even so, "ecosystem" has very positive connotations to me, no less positive than "garden".

"Walled garden" isn't a positive phrase, it's a tongue-in-cheek way to say you're in a pretty prison.

To my ears, "closed ecosystem" sounds less terrible than "walled garden". "Walled garden" is the same as "gilded cage".