Techdirt. Stories filed under "closed"

The Flipside: Embracing Closed Gardens Like The Apple App Store Shows Just How Un-Free You Want To Be

Timothy Geigner — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 03:43:14 PST

Just the other day, I told you the story of some immature and racist apps in Google's Play store. In that post, I discussed how the kind of speech that offends is truly a barometer of exactly how free we want speech to be. It's one thing to embrace free speech that suits us, but it is every bit our duty to protect speech that does not suit us as well, because it is the ideal of free speech we are protecting, not the speech with which we disagree. The only other option, of course, is to become a society less permissible of speech. True, that society may yield a lower amount of speech the majority finds offensive, but what else gets caught in the drain-trap that shouldn't have? We remind one another all the time that private companies like Google aren't under obligation to the 1st Amendment and free speech, but we still have that ideal that permeates our society and so some of us choose to embrace the more open and permissible environments because we believe more information, data, and culture is always better and we'll deal with the annoyances that come along with it. Others choose to embrace the Apple App store, which gives you a wonderful idea of exactly what happens when speech and culture become more constricted.

Take one recent example: Apple's rejection of an gaming app based on the war in Syria, created to help educate others about exactly what is occurring there. The game was rejected based on Apple's not allowing apps that "solely target a specific race, culture, a real government or corporation or any other real entity".

"This decision is a shame really as it makes it hard to talk about the real world," said designer Tomas Rawlings.

"We had hoped that Apple would be more nuanced in how they applied this rule but we got a bit worried when it had been in submission for around two weeks without a decision - we then figured that because of the controversy of using the gaming medium to cover an ongoing war meant passing the game had become an issue for them."

Rawlings insists there is nothing actually offensive in the game and notes that the response from those that got their hands on it has been generally positive. From what I can tell, the game is essentially a quick scenario decision making game told from the Syrian rebels point of view. It incorporates real world news items and events and allows the player to decide how to handle them. There's no deragatory name-calling. No over the top violence. But because they mention a "real government", it's out.

And that's exactly the problem with a less permissible garden like Apple's app store. Sure, in Google's garden (or the wider open internet, for that matter) you will occasionally have to ignore a few weeds, but you get the full spectrum of flowers to enjoy. Apple's garden may have less weeds, but they have less flowers, and the choice over which flowers you see isn't up to you. That's not the system I want to embrace.

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Game Developers Concerned About A Potentially Closed Windows 8

Zachary Knight — Tue, 7 Aug 2012 00:05:00 PDT

A couple of years ago, we highlighted a story that asked the question, "What if Microsoft Had To Approve Every App On Windows?" At the time, this was a purely hypothetical experiment to highlight some of the weaknesses inherent in a closed platform such as the iPhone. Little did we know at the time, such a scenario might be coming to pass. Microsoft has been talking up its latest operating system, Windows 8, for a while now trying to drum up excitement for its bold new look and direction. Yet, some game developers are taking a step back and looking at the broader direction Windows seems to be going here.

Gabe Newell is one of those developers. In an interview at the Casual Connect conference, he questioned the move to a more closed ecosystem for Windows 8.

In order for innovation to happen, a bunch of things that aren’t happening on closed platforms need to occur. Valve wouldn’t exist today without the PC, or Epic, or Zynga, or Google. They all wouldn’t have existed without the openness of the platform. There’s a strong tempation to close the platform, because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors’ access to the platform, and they say ‘That’s really exciting.’

We are looking at the platform and saying, ‘We’ve been a free rider, and we’ve been able to benefit from everything that went into PCs and the Internet, and we have to continue to figure out how there will be open platforms.’

Here Gabe states that many game companies, not just Valve, would not be in existence were it not for the openness of Windows in the past. Now that this openness is threatened, his company is looking at alternative operating systems. This is one of the drivers behind Valve's recent push toward Linux compatibility.

The big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People don’t realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior.

We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. It’s a hedging strategy. I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality.

If you think about it, he is right. Take a look at the original marketplace for iPhone applications. When the iPhone App Store was released, it was a closed platform. If you weren't approved by Apple you couldn't release your app or game on it. Even with the presence of web apps and alternative app distribution through jailbreaking, the system remains essentially closed for the majority of iPhone users who are not aware of or don't want to go through the trouble of using these alternative distribution channels. Can you imagine what the overall impact would be for something as widely adopted as Windows? Going back to that hypothetical question posted above, would Microsoft have approved Steam for release knowing it would compete directly with its own Games For Windows Live service?

Since Gabe raised this point, a couple of other developers have echoed his sentiment. In a tweet responding to Gabe's "catastrophe" comment, Blizzard's Rob Pardo stated, "not awesome for Blizzard either." Rob later clarified the statement by tweeting, "Yeah... more trying to say that if everything comes to pass that Gabe said it wouldn't be very good for us either."

Next during a Reddit AMA, Notch responded to a question about the future of indie game development with the following:

I hope we can keep a lot of open and free platforms around. If Microsoft decides to lock down Windows 8, it would be very very bad for Indie games and competition in general.

If we can keep open platforms around, there's going to be a lot of very interesting games in ten years, mixed in with the huge AAA games that we all love.

So not only is having a viable open platform ideal for large game companies such as Valve, but also the budding developers such as what Notch once was. If Windows were to close off in the same way that Apple has closed off the iPhone, many developers of not just games but other software may not be able to survive on the platform. Just as Valve is looking at moving to other platforms, those developers will follow suit. As more developers of games and software shift from Windows to other platforms, their users will potentially shift was well.

It will certainly be interesting to see where Microsoft takes Windows 8 in this regard. Is it willing to take a path so diametrically opposed to its own history and the growing desire of the public for more open platforms? As independent artists and developers continue producing and distributing their work outside gated pathways, can such a change be a viable business option?

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Craigslist Demands 'Exclusive License' On Your Posts

Mike Masnick — Thu, 2 Aug 2012 03:53:22 PDT

When Craigslist sued PadMapper and 3taps, we questioned the legal basis for much of the lawsuit, in particular the claim that Craigslist even could sue over copyright, when any copyrightable content is created by the end-users and not Craigslist itself. It appears that someone at Craigslist realized that it was somewhere very close to the Righthaven line in claiming a bare right to sue over someone else's work, and made a tweak, demanding "exclusive" rights.

I first saw this via Slashdot on the Baligu blog, and was trying to go through the legal implications, but thankfully, Tim Lee over at Ars Technica did all the heavy lifting for us in speaking to IP lawyers James Grimmelmann and Mark Lyon who are quite skeptical of this move.

What's odd is that this "change" isn't even to its terms of use, which don't actually claim an exclusive license. Instead, the company has just added text to the posting page saying that you are granting the company such a right:

Clicking "Continue" confirms that craigslist is the exclusive licensee of this content, with the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without its consent.

The theory, as Lee notes, is probably that by more forcefully claiming exclusive rights, perhaps it can get over the hump and have the right to actually enforce those copyrights -- but that legal theory is speculative at best.

It's kind of interesting, because someone could also potentially argue that this statement contradicts the company's own terms of use since they're different but perhaps more interesting are the wider legal questions raised by this -- including what happens if you, the user, post your classified ad to any other site. Craigslist seems to be claiming that it can go after those other sites (and, um, potentially you, I think...) for reposting "its" work. That's crazy and something that completely goes against Craigslist's standard "user-friendly" approach to everything.

Once again, this is showing how Craigslist's pursuit of these kinds of legal issues really seems to go against what made Craigslist so successful, turning the company into much more of a cranky legal bully. Lots of companies that start out innovative and open, do later change and flip sides on things like this, but Craigslist always seemed like the kind of company that would stay on the right side of the "evil line." It's too bad to see that it seems to be so aggressively diving over to the copyright bully side of the line.

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Death Of iFlow Reader Due To Apple Changes Shows Why Betting On Closed Platforms Is Risky

Mike Masnick — Wed, 18 May 2011 19:05:52 PDT

Tom points us to the post from the makers of iFlow Reader, a popular eBook app for iPhones and iPads, about how the company and product are shutting down almost entirely due to Apple's change in policies. Specifically, there are two key policies that seem to conflict with each other, unless the entire point was to drive all third party ebook retailers out of business. As the iFlow Reader guys describe it:

The crux of the matter is that Apple is now requiring us, as well as all other ebook sellers, to give them 30% of the selling price of any ebook that we sell from our iOS app. Unfortunately, because of the "agency model" that has been adopted by the largest publishers, our gross margin on ebooks after paying the wholesaler is less than 30%, which means that we would have to take a loss on all ebooks sold. This is not a sustainable business model.

Where did the agency model come from and what is it? The agency model was created by Apple who made it a requirement for any publisher who wished to sell books through Apple’s iBooks app. The agency model has three key points:

The publisher is now the retailer of record. The company selling the eBook to the end user is an "agent" of the retailer who receives a commission on the sale.

All sales agents are required to sell books at the same retail price, which is set by the publisher. No one can sell at a different price.

All sales agents get a 30% commission on the sale of a book. No one gets a different deal. Prior to the agency model, publishers typically offered retailers a 50% discount.

The key point here is that all sellers now get a 30% commission and Apple now wants a 30% fee, which is all of our gross margin and then some.

For obvious reasons, that's unsustainable. The clearly upset folks who are now shutting down their operation point out how hard they worked to communicate with Apple to make sure they weren't wasting their time building the app and company:

We submitted our new iFlowReader app Apple in November of 2010 and they approved it a few days later. After approval, we made substantial additional investments in licensing fees, integration fees, and server fees so that we could open our ebook store on December 2, 2010. Two months later, Apple changed the rules and put us out of business. They now want 30% of the sale price of any books, which they know full well, is all of our profits and more. What sounds like a reasonable demand when packaged by Apple's extraordinary public relations department is essentially an eviction notice to all ebook sellers on iOS. After over three years of developing products for iOS during which we had over six million downloads of our BeamItDown iFlowReader products, Apple is giving us the boot by making it financially impossible for us to survive. They want all of the eBook business on iOS and since they have the unilateral power to get it, we are out of business and the iFlow Reader is dead.

We put our faith in Apple and they screwed us. This happened even though we went to great lengths to clear our plans with Apple because we did not want to make this substantial investment of time and money blindly. Apple's response to our detailed inquiries was to tell us that our plans did not infringe their rules in any way, which was true at the time, but there is one little catch. Apple can change the rules at any time and they did. Sadly they must have known full well that they were going to do this. Apple's iBooks was already in development when we talked to them and they certainly must have known that their future plans would doom us to failure no matter how good our product was. We never really had a chance.

Of course, this really shouldn't be too surprising. When you're making a bet on a closed system and relying entirely on that, it's inevitable that there are going to be issues. It's one of the reasons why we keep hearing more and more developers wanting to move away from developing native iOS apps towards developing more open standard apps, such as in HTML 5. Not only does it make it easier to build cross platform apps, but it also means they're not completely at the whims of a single company that's been known to reverse direction with little notice.

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How Wikileaks & Operation Payback Have Exposed Infrastructure That Should Be Decentralized, But Isn't

Mike Masnick — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 12:59:00 PST

The classic line about how "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," is certainly being proven true yet again these days, but there is an interesting corollary that might be worth considering in this as well: which is that sometimes these attempts at censorship expose the need for new routes, and those routes are quickly created.

We've been pointing out repeatedly for a while now that the real issue we're witnessing with things like Wikileaks and Operation Payback is the confusion a centralized/closed system has when it comes up against a more distributed and open system. Much of what we've seen concerning both Wikileaks and Operation Payback over the past few weeks is exposing the cracks in the system where things that should be more decentralized and distributed are not.

However, it seems that each time new centralized intermediaries spring up to cause problems, all it's really done is to drive more people to figure out ways to create more distributed and decentralized alternatives. We've already discussed a more decentralized DNS system, but now the EFF is listing out a variety of distributed and decentralized projects that it hopes will help people route around censorship attempts.

As the EFF notes, many of those individual projects probably won't succeed or catch on, but others will. In a few years, it will be interesting to look back and see just how many new, more distributed and decentralized infrastructure systems really came out of the "fights" we're seeing splashed across the news today. The real shame, of course, is that the US government, who has been speaking so forcefully about being against online censorship over the last year or so, may ultimately be the leading cause for these new infrastructure tools to be built, and not because it supported them directly, but because of its current attempts at censorship.

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Operation Payback And Wikileaks Show The Battle Lines Are About Distributed & Open vs. Centralized & Closed

Mike Masnick — Thu, 9 Dec 2010 09:11:55 PST

Back in October, I wrote a thought-piece on how "the revolution will be distributed," comparing Wikileaks to Anonymous' "Operation Payback" (whose tactics I disagree with). I noted that the two were very different, and were focused on very different issues, but that both were essentially about distributed and open systems taking on systems that were centralized and closed -- and that the folks in those centralized and closed systems didn't seem to understand this. Thus, all of their reactions did little to fix the challenges they were facing.

It seems that my comparison of the two operations was a bit more prophetic than I expected. In the wake of the latest Wikileaks saga, Operation Payback is getting attention for pointing its DDoS takedown efforts on Visa and MasterCard for their decision to disallow any payments to Wikileaks via their cards.

I still disagree with the tactics of Operation Payback -- which I fear will be counterproductive and could lead many people to think this is all about some "rowdy kids" rather than people with a serious agenda. However, it is rather telling how much attention they're getting. The folks behind Operation Payback point out that they're not affiliated with Wikileaks, but:

We fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas.

Again, I'm struck by the simple split many have here: it really is an argument between those who believe in distributed and open vs. centralized and closed -- and I'm still not sure if the folks supporting centralized and closed even realize this. Their response, to date, has been to act as if they're fighting a centralized system. They focus on things like Wikileaks' domain and its founder -- as if that's the issue. They target the centralized pieces. And even if you make the argument that Wikileaks needs Julian Assange to stay together, if it were to shut down, it wouldn't take long for a ton of other, similar offerings to spring up in its place. And, they would probably be even more effective (and potentially more damaging).

While I don't necessarily like "war" analogies, what we're seeing is very much a battle between the way people want to see information flow, and one side seems to be still fighting the last war.

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Has Sony Finally Realized That Open Platforms Are Good?

Mike Masnick — Fri, 21 May 2010 15:54:07 PDT

Sony is pretty famous for creating closed platform after closed platform locked down with incredibly damaging DRM. Back in 2005, there was a surprise statement from Sony's Ken Kutaragi, where he admitted that the company made a mistake in focusing on proprietary consumer electronics... but it seemed like no one was listening. The company kept on coming out with locked down, proprietary offerings. So, we were a bit skeptical a year ago when Sony CEO Howard Stringer once again claimed that Sony should have been more open. You can say it all you want, but if your solutions are still proprietary, it's pretty meaningless.

Could Sony finally be realizing that there really is a benefit to openness? Perhaps only after getting crushed in the market. But, people are noting that Sony's agreement to use Google's open GoogleTV platform is extremely un-Sony-like. Of course, it might just be a desperation ploy -- and too little, too late -- for a company that hasn't been considered a real leader in the space in many years.

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Apple: Closed, Proprietary Systems Are Bad (Unless They're Our Own)

Carlo Longino — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:58:59 PDT

Steve Jobs fired the latest salvo in the ongoing Apple-Adobe spat today, with his "Thoughts on Flash" posted on the Apple site. In short, he says that Adobe looking out just for its own interests in drawing developers to its "100% proprietary" Flash ecosystem while Apple supports a great, open standards-based world. But just as we pointed out a couple of weeks ago when Apple moved to block cross-platform development tools, regardless of what Apple says, its interest is locking developers into its Apple-controlled and dominated ecosystem. Nearly every accusation Jobs levels at Adobe and its products can be made about Apple and the way it seeks to control iPhone app development. Jobs brings up Apple's support for open Web standards, but that's really little more than a red herring to distract attention from how Apple wants to lock down developers into its own ecosystem. Jobs makes it clear that he has no interest in developers using any platform apart from the iPhone, and any tool that helps them do so is worthy of his scorn. So for him to talk about supporting Web standards -- with the point being that they're standards, available across platforms -- is disingenuous when Apple's strategy for apps is guilty of pretty much everything he accuses Adobe of. None of this, on a strategic level, is particularly reprehensible, they're just business decisions (even if we don't agree with the approach). But Apple's apparent insistence on playing by a different set of rules to everyone else, and the hot air that accompanies it, grates just a little bit.

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What If Microsoft Had To Approve Every App On Windows?

Mike Masnick — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:17:00 PDT

I've been pointing out why an open platform beats a closed platform over the long haul with regards to the iPhone, and linking to various stories concerning the arbitrary nature of being allowed (or not) on the iPhone. But, Harry McCracken, over at Technologizer, does a great job illustrating the point by playing the "what if" game, and thinking about how Windows would have developed had Microsoft similarly controlled every app. It doesn't take long to realize how much slower innovation would likely have been on the PC platform (though, it might have opened up more of an opportunity for other platforms):

Would Microsoft have distributed Microsoft Office rivals such as SmartSuite or WordPerfect Office via its app store?

Well, maybe, in theory at least-after all, it doesn't sell Microsoft Office as part of Windows, so it couldn't use the "it duplicates functionality that's already in the product" excuse. Call me a cynic, though, but I suspect that competitive office suites would have run into trouble if Microsoft had controlled all Windows software distribution. And hey, didn't WordPerfect duplicate features in Notepad?

How about Netscape Navigator?

When Netscape first appeared in 1994, the current version of Windows (3.11) didn't have a browser. Even Windows 95 didn't have one at first--Internet Explorer was part of the extra-cost Plus Pack. Then again, Windows 95 did ship with the dreadful client for the original version of MSN, a proprietary online service which definitely did compete with the Web. That might have been reason enough for Microsoft to nix Navigator for duplicating Windows functionality. And once IE was part of Windows, Microsoft could have given Navigator the boot retroactively.

Safari? Firefox? Chrome?

They all appeared long after Windows got a browser as standard equipment. No, no, and no.

And it goes on from there. Fun thought experiment if you're one of the believers that Apple's closed iPhone system is somehow "good" for innovation.

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From Closed To Open: iPhone App Developer Skepticism Highlights Platform Trajectory

Mike Masnick — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:18:03 PDT

I've been getting into some interesting discussions with people lately concerning open vs. closed platforms -- especially in light of the supposed "success" of Apple's iPhone app store, which is a very closed platform. And the point that I've tried to make is that you have to understand the trajectories of these things over time. At any given time, it's never difficult to find a closed platform that is successful. In fact, I'd argue that if you are reshaping a market, often it helps to have a closed platform initially to drive that market in a useful direction -- though, this can really only be accomplished by someone visionary (Steve Jobs certainly counts). The question is how does this play out long term. And the answer is that you can't stay closed too long, or open solutions will catch up and surpass you. We've seen this pattern multiples times (closed AOL --> open internet?).

Where this gets trickier is that the open solutions are almost always substandard to the closed solutions initially. In some ways, this is by design. The closed solution is often much cleaner and slicker, and so it gets a lot of the initial use. But, overtime, the limitations of the closed solutions become increasingly clear, and as people bump up against those limits, frustrations increase, and more and more effort is put towards making the open solutions better -- even to the point that eventually they exceed the closed solution. It's a messy process, but the point where momentum shifts is often a subtle one, and the proprietors of the closed solution usually don't recognize it's a problem until way too late.

I believe that's the case with the App Store. The iPhone itself did an amazing job pushing the state of the mobile phone/portable computer market forward. There are some people who like to mock it as nothing special, but that's unfair. The device itself was a huge leap forward in demonstrating what a phone could be, and many others are just starting to grasp what this means more than two years after the original was introduced. That said, we're seeing more and more evidence concerning frustrations on the limits imposed by Apple's closed system, such as the arbitrary rejections of apps.

James points us to a worthwhile post from an iPhone developer, noting how the process is getting to the point where it's less and less worth it to develop for that platform. You have to put in a ton of work, and then you have to wait for quite a while just to get the app approved (or rejected), and the whole process is quite arbitrary. With that in mind, developers have a lot less certainty, and it shows a growing interest in other platforms.

To date, admittedly, such alternatives really haven't been very good. There are other app stores (some more open than others), but none has really been able to build up much traction yet on other devices. But there's a huge opportunity here if someone else can make this happen (or, if there were a way to standardize across some of the competitors) and start doing a better job serving both developers and consumers. The closed solution helps define the initial market -- but the open solution almost always wins in the long run.

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Why Facebook Can't Become Twitter: Its Closed Nature

Mike Masnick — Mon, 4 May 2009 13:57:00 PDT

There's been plenty of talk about how Facebook has been trying to morph more into being like Twitter, to avoid being "last year's model" when it comes to the "social networking hype focus." Last week, the company got some news for supposedly "opening up" newsfeeds for outside developers to build into their apps, with many people saying that this is how the site becomes more "Twitter-like." The NY Times had a big writeup over the weekend, talking about what a crazy idea it is that Facebook would just let anyone come in and "take" its content and put into other apps -- even though, there are tons of services that do exactly that and have found it to be quite useful. Except, it appears that Facebook isn't quite as open as the press coverage and press releases would lead you to believe -- and a big part of it is the foundation on which Facebook is built. One developer (full disclosure: the guy in question is a close friend/former housemate) recently created a rather useful app that turned the Facebook feed into an RSS file. A review of the app at Read Write Web discussed how incredibly useful the app is, listing out five things it makes possible that were impossible before -- partly in making the app more Twitter-like. This is great. Hurray for openness making things possible, right?

Well, not exactly. It seems that Facebook is hamstrung due to its own setup. Because the initial purpose of Facebook was for private updates between friends, making that data public is a huge no-no, and so it took just a couple days before the useful app was shut down, noting that it could violate user privacy. Since Facebook has been a punching bag over privacy issues for a while, this is no surprise. If you had a friend's status updates in your news feed, and he or she had set them to be viewable only by certain people, converting them into a public RSS feed does have potential privacy implications.

That makes sense from a privacy standpoint, but it shows why it will be quite difficult for Facebook to "become Twitter." Its entire setup is in many ways the anti-Twitter. Twitter was designed, on purpose, to be extremely public and open, and that's how people use it. Facebook, however, with its fine-grained privacy controls and focus on personal communication only between people who agree to communicate with each other is pretty limited in how much it can open up. The more it tries to become like Twitter, the more its own setup gets in the way. The app to make your Facebook news feed into an RSS feed is quite useful... but it can't work with Facebook's privacy settings the way things are set up today. Of course, some might point out that an individual could just as easily take their own Facebook news feed and republish it publicly using the time-tested method known as "cut-and-paste." Realistically speaking, creating an RSS feed is really not all that different than just cutting and pasting the info directly. The issue isn't so much privacy policies, as the user's individual decision over what to do with the info, though, Facebook would probably note that the automated push-button nature of the Newsfeed RSS app is the problem.

Either way, beyond just demonstrating the general differences between Twitter and Facebook, this also shows how legacy decisions, which make all the sense in the world at one point in a service's development, can significantly hinder certain changes later on.

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Don't Announce You're Open When You Just Blocked Someone Out

Mike Masnick — Wed, 5 Nov 2008 16:41:00 PST

Earlier this week, Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff bashed Microsoft and its new cloud computing initiative, suggesting that it was unfriendly to partners: "They hate everybody and we love everybody, and that's pretty much the difference. We even love Microsoft. ... This is our core strategy, love." While we tend to agree that Microsoft's strategy leaves much to be desired, that doesn't mean that Salesforce's strategy is really all that much better. In response to Benioff's claims that they "love everyone," the CEO of Zoho suggests a less lovey-dovey version of Salesforce.com, noting that Zoho was all set to launch products on Salesforce's own cloud computing platform, Force (formerly AppExchange), when suddenly Salesforce.com blocked Zoho -- mainly because Zoho offers a competing CRM system.

Just a reminder that it's easy to say you're open -- but if you're not really open, someone's going to call you on it.

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Thomson Reuters Sues George Mason University For Making Its Software Output More Useful

Mike Masnick — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:35:20 PDT

A bunch of folks have been submitting the news that financial information giant Thomson Reuters is suing George Mason University for the high crime of releasing some software that can convert the output of Thomson Reuters own EndNote software into a more open format. EndNote is software for creating bibliographies, from a variety of different databases. The George Mason software, Zotero, does the same thing -- but also will take documents saved in EndNote's proprietary format and save it in its own open format. In normal times, under normal laws, this shouldn't be a problem. Reverse engineering is considered a perfectly legitimate practice in most cases -- and, in fact, is considered an important part of the competitive market in driving innovation. But, thanks to the DMCA, when it comes to software, this type of behavior can be blocked within a license agreement. This is one of the worst parts of the DMCA, in that it's clearly not about protecting copyrighted material, but about preventing any sort of competition in the market place.

If Thomson Reuters execs actually thought about this, they would realize that Zotero actually makes EndNote more valuable by making the output more valuable. As long as Thomson Reuters is willing to keep adding more and better features, then it should have nothing to worry about from Zotero, who only enhances the value of EndNote's output. Instead, Thomson Reuters is using the old claim of felony interference with a business model to shut down a university-produced open competitor. Thomson Reuters' claims make this quite clear, in saying that Zotero is "destroying the EndNote customer base." Back here, in the real world, most people call that competition and think it's a good thing, rather than against the law.

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Why Zittrain's Techno-Pessimism Is Unwarranted

Timothy Lee — Wed, 2 Jul 2008 12:48:18 PDT

Ars Technica reviews Jonathan Zittrain's new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Zittrain is by all accounts a smart guy and an engaging speaker, and it sounds like his book makes a lot of worthwhile points about the importance of open, "generative" technologies. But I just can't get worked up about Zittrain's warnings that the dominance of open systems is a fragile, temporary thing. It seems to me that there's a basic tension at the heart of Zittrain's argument. On the one hand, he argues (correctly in my view) that open platforms are better for innovation because of their lower barriers to entry. On the other hand, he wants us to believe that despite that inherent advantage, open technologies are on the brink of being eclipsed by closed platforms like the iPhone.

I think this misses a couple of important points. In the first place, I think Zittrain draws the wrong lessons from history. Zittrain himself notes that until the 1990s, the world was full of proprietary networking technologies and computing platforms that had big advantages over open technologies like TCP/IP, Unix, and the mostly-open PC platform. Open technologies had a few advantages of their own -- most notably government support of TCP/IP -- but open platforms were definitely the underdogs in many respects. And then, of course, the open platforms utterly destroyed the closed ones. Almost everyone now uses TCP/IP, while AOL is now little more than a mediocre website. Virtually all desktops and laptops -- including Macs and a lot of Unix workstations -- now largely share a common architecture. And almost every operating system not made by Microsoft is built on some versian of Unix.

Zittrain would have us regard all of this as some kind of fluke or lucky break, that the whole thing could come crashing down at any minute. But I think it's evidence that better technologies tend to win out in the marketplace. TCP/IP beat out AOL and other proprietary services precisely because open architectures enable more innovation. And once an open architecture comes to dominate a given market, it becomes harder, not easier for a proprietary product to displace it, because network effects create tremendous intertia on behalf of established open standards. I'm hard pressed to come up with any examples of a well-established open standard getting displaced by a closed one. Rather, what tends to happen is that new, proprietary technologies tend to get built on top of open ones. The top layers of the iPhone software stack may be closed, but it's built on TCP/IP, HTTP, and a host of other open standards.

It doesn't, therefore, make sense to view the iPhone as a threat to "generativity." The iPhone itself may not be "generative," but it's built on the same open standards as more open devices. That means that growing the iPhone market is a net positive for openness overall. True, people who buy an actual iPhone aren't getting the full advantage of generativity, but they are helping to further entrench TCP/IP and the web, platforms on which other more generative technologies can thrive alongside the iPhone. Moreover, if Zittrain is right that open platforms promote more innovation, which I think he is, then we should expect the same thing to happen at the top of the stack as happened at lower layers of the stack: over time, open mobile platforms like Android should enjoy more innovation than closed platforms like the iPhone, and the former should gradually displace the latter. Consumers tend to choose more open platforms over time not because consumers care about "generativity," per se, but because they want the phone with the best software, and open platforms tend to get the best software over time. And smart companies will tend to open up their platforms over time, lest competitors leapfrog them with a more open product. Indeed, as Mike pointed out a few days ago, that's already happening with Nokia's decision to open source its Symbian operating system.

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Ricochet Is Really, Really, Really Dead? No Joke?

Mike Masnick — Tue, 1 Apr 2008 20:02:00 PDT

I'd almost think this was an April Fool's joke if it weren't for both Glenn Fleischman and Steve Stroh reporting on it, but it appears that Ricochet, one of the first wireless ISP services is finally dead, for real. This is the service that used up more than its allotted nine lives. I was an early Ricochet customer, and still have two old Ricochet modems. For a period of time when I was killing off broadband companies, Ricochet's 128kbps service via Metricom was my connection to the world -- until it went bankrupt and shut down the network. After that, Ricochet kept resurfacing, as the company was bought and then sold and bought and sold again. However, each new owner would try to do something new with it, only to realize that the wireless network had totally missed its chance. With the rise of WiFi and cellular 3G, Ricochet just didn't make sense any more. Still, it's a bit sad, as I still remember wowing people by being able to connect to the internet while on the go. These days it may be common, but a decade ago it was a big deal.

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