[OT] Mac App Store

[Richmond]

On 10/23/2010 05:40 PM, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> To most people, this has never had anything to do with OS choice or with
> Apple's stock price.  It has to do with corporate conduct.  It has to do
> with the following:-
>
> 1)  Do you want a society in which your access to applications and thus
> increasingly to media is in the control of a few corporations who make the
> platforms?  Or do you want a world in which you buy the platform, install
> what you want from where you want, buy, read and watch and listen to what
> you want from wherever you want?  Its the CD model versus the iTunes model.
>
> 2)  Do you as developer want to have one route to market, an App store run
> by the device manufacturer, and have him able to eject your stuff instantly
> on a whim?  And then let it back in again on a whim, who knows for how long?
>
> The reason the debate now comes up with OSX has nothing to do with that OS
> in particular, it is that people think, reasonably enough based on the track
> record, that Apple is starting to move OSX to the iPod and iPad model.  They
> don't trust it.  And they think it has serious societal implications.  Once
> again, reasonably enough, given the track record.  These are the guys who
> ban apps based on what you can, but do not have to, use them to download,
> when the material you allegedly might download is perfectly legal in your
> jurisdiction, but for some reason, the guys at Apple do not approve of it.
> They banned Matlab, for Heaven's sake!  A version of Ulysses!
>
> Corporate control of what you can do with your computer or your ebook reader
> or your tablet is a threat, probably in the West now emerging as the main
> threat, to intellectual freedom.  This is not OS wars.  This is corporate
> conduct wars.  The same or very similar points can be made about Amazon and
> its ebook format and sales methods.
>
> It is perfectly possible that being on the wrong side of that debate may be
> very profitable for Apple and lead to rising share prices. I doubt it, I
> think the probable effect of these efforts at control will be to promote
> hacking and piracy.

The other day, one of the kids who worked with RunRev with me over the 
summer
asked me where he could get a copy of RevMedia for Windows as his system 
had been
hosed by a virus and he hadn't got a backup copy.

I was severely tempted . . . but didn't.


>   But even were it a good route to rising profits and
> stock prices, doesn't make it any righter.  And the problem is, Apple always
> has been evil in this way, but it used not to matter because it was too
> small for its example to matter.  Now it is getting bigger, its a real force
> in society.  So you can no longer say, you don't like it don't buy it.  You
> buy it or not, its influence is profound.