Why Open Source lovers should hate Apple

Open Source lovers have long had a love affair with Apple, and treat Microsoft as if it were the spawn of the devil. But there are plenty of reasons why the Open Source community should shun Apple. Some of the more vocal members of the community are already speaking up.

Nik Cubrilovic, in TechCrunchIT post titled "The New Apple Walled Garden" sums up the issue best. He starts off his post this way:

Geeks and enthusiasts wearing Wordpress t-shirts, using laptops covered in Data Portability, Microformats and RSS stickers lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM.

The device, of course, is the iPhone 3G. In his post, he notes that the new device is about as anti-Open Source as a device can be, yet the Open Source community still greeted it with open arms:

The same community who demand all from Microsoft, feel gifted and special when Apple give them an inch of rope. When Microsoft introduced DRM into Media Player it was bad bad bad - and it wasn’t even mandatory, it simply allowed content owners a way to distribute and sell content from anywhere.

 Apple has wrapped the iPhone SDK in enough licensing, security controls and right management that it would make the Microsoft Active Desktop team blush.

In case you missed the point, he adds this:

Apple has a very strong following in the open source community, and I can no longer understand it nor justify my own support (I am writing this on a Macbook). They built OS X on FreeBSD (a project I have enthusiastically supported, contributed to and been a user of for 10 years or more), they built Safari on KHTML, and are now using libraries such as SproutCore in MobileMe. They have taken open source and everything it built and leveraged it to get to market faster - yet they have now, with iTunes and the new SDK, built a layer on top of it that excludes others. For Apple, open source is great when it furthers their own goals, but not when using it with Apple software where it may further the goals of others.

Cubrilovic is citing just one more example of the way that Apple gets a free ride --- in this instance from the Open Source community. But Apple has also been given a free ride by the press, and by the Internet community overall. Apple has been able to use its ability to build great hardware and software as a way to convince people that somehow its business practices are of a higher order than other companies. Nothing could be further from the truth. Maybe now, with Cubrilovic's post, Apple will stop getting that free ride.

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