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Comment by ultimoo | Hacker News Reader

I still find it strange at times to wrap my head around the fact that for decades we championed a distributed and an open world-scale system - The Internet.

And now, we are going back to policies controlled by 'guidelines' and rules and terms and conditions of large corporations -- Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Blackberry. Either we as a developer community got lost somewhere; or this was a careful, well thought-out move by the said corporations. And it is only getting stronger as people are replacing laptops with tablets and so on.

I'm not commenting on the AppGratis fiasco, I couldn't care less about it. Sorry for ranting.

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Its freedom in exchange for comfort: the casual user no longer has to worry about looking for software because there's a large corporation telling him what he can do and what he can't.

For many freedom of choice is stressful, but receiving orders is not.

It's also cognitive load. Facing infinite options with no guide isn't great. You don't read the entire internet, and likewise you're not looking for all options when looking for an application. Apple hosts all iOS apps, they have to sell the prospect of an open platform, so AppGratis acted as a filter.

Much of the paid-blogosphere is acting as a similar filter to this end. BoingBoing, waxy, and other early-web popular aggregators are known for reliably pointing at new-and-cool, not for being cool. Now blogspam aggregators are a business with margins.

I'm not sure how much things have really become worse here, as opposed to just shuffling things around.

20 years ago, a lot of people would have owned a Nintendo system or similar, which had all the things you discussed and more. 10 years ago, most cell phones could run third-party apps, but the requirements were so strict that almost none of any interest were available. The PC was theoretically an open system, but Microsoft was doing their best to close it up with business measures that were about as effective as these technological measures are today.

I'm not trying to defend in any way what Apple and friends get up to here. But I think things are not as bad as you say, or perhaps were always as bad as you say. The fight for openness is ongoing.

> 20 years ago, a lot of people would have owned a Nintendo system or similar, which had all the things you discussed and more.

This is still the case for consoles nowadays. But as much as I find it regrettable, there is a big difference between a single-purpose device like a game console and a general-purpose computing device like a smartphone.

> The PC was theoretically an open system, but Microsoft was doing their best to close it up with business measures that were about as effective as these technological measures are today.

Microsoft's famous abuses of its position have been sanctioned (not that it did poor Netscape any good, obviously...). It's a valid comparison with the AppGratis situation, where the corporation does not tolerate competition, but there never was the kind of full-spectrum filtering and mandatory corporate approval you see from all players in the smartphone space.

To put it another way: everyone (except Richard Stallman) has always wanted to use both open and closed systems. There is room for both, and neither will kill the other.

Oh? Only Richard Stallman? You mind including me in that list?

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