Like most of Jonathan Ive’s work, the iPad is beautiful. Like most of Apple’s work, it also makes me uneasy. I was planning to write about this feeling of unease, so imagine my delight when I discovered that Timothy B. Lee and others have already done the work for me. In “Why Geeks Hate the iPad,” “Tinkerer’s Sunset,” and “Nothing Creative,” we’re treated to a thorough overview of what’s sacrificed when Apple compels you to trade flexibility and freedom for a shiny new platform. I believe you can apply this same analysis to the iPhone, the iTouch, and everything else in the Apple’s consumer electronics stable.
Put another way, the iPad and its siblings are not personal computing platforms. They’re Apple computing platforms. The hardware itself is sealed, discouraging anyone from seeing how it works or improving on it. The platform software is largely proprietary. The vaunted App Store, which brought to the computing public the same ease of installation and application management that open source users have been enjoying for years, is rigidly controlled to advance Apple’s interests. Just ask Google.
Now, this doesn’t make Apple evil. They’re obviously entitled to produce as many beautiful, locked-up devices as they like. It’s important, though, to understand just what you’re trading for Apple’s warm, comfortable architecture of control.
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In case you needed more evidence that IA is a chaotic, arbitrary, and disorganized activity in the DOD, this map tries to impose order on the process. Lulz ensue. Driptray rightfully declares this mess a “glorious misuse of the portable document format.”
HT: The inimitable Mr. Carr
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Posted 21 December 2009
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On the heels of the Open Government Memo of January 21st, 2009, the Obama Administration has issued the Open Government Directive. The Directive tells agencies what they must do to meet the expectations set by the Memo. The directive names many deadlines for agency compliance, most of them around reducing FOIA backlogs and increasing the amount of agency data released to the public. This isn’t surprising, since the Memo names transparency, collaboration, and participation as the guiding principles. Transparency is the easiest to articulate and implement — just get the data out there in a useful form. Josh Tauberer’s Open Data is Civic Capital: Best Practices for “Open Government Data” is an excellent handbook for doing this. If you want to track agencies’ progress, the Sunlight Labs folks have produced the outstanding Open Watcher.
What’s most interesting to me, and my friends at Open Source for America, though, are the more ambiguous orders. Although the Directive does not use the phrase ‘open source software’ at all, many of the principles and methodologies described are obvious references to open source. Many of these orders stand out as opportunities for open source developers, in the public and private sector, to demonstrate how our development model can help the Administration also make good on the last two principles: collaboration and participation. As Macon Phillips, the White House New Media Director said, “Open Source is… the best form of civic participation.”
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Higher education is now almost absurdly expensive. In an effort to reduce the cost of developing and delivering educational material, there are a number of initiatives around open curricula right now. The idea is that content generated by the academic community can be made freely available so that professors and publishers don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. It’s basically a commons for educational content. The folks at the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (who have a pretty great blog on this subject) call it “OER.” Ultimately, advocates like CCCOER hope to make higher education more accessible. The Open College Textbook Act of 2009, for example, notes that 200,000 students do not enroll in a higher education system due to the cost, which includes an average annual textbook budget of $805 to $1,229. The bill appropriates $15 million in 2010 for one-year grants to anyone who wants to create open content.
A few weeks ago, the Obama administration announced a $12 billion investment in community colleges, and $500 million of that is allocated to sponsoring the creation of open courseware. As described by Inside Higher Ed:
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Here’s a really nice writeup on the CONNECT Code-a-thon at iHealthBeat. They quote me a lot, which is what makes it really nice.
Most of you already know about the US Courts’ shameful profiteering through the PACER system. They charge $0.08/page for public court documents and in so doing stifle the public’s access to their own content. Not long ago, our friends at CITP released an open source project called RECAP. When you install this gem in your browser, documents your retrieve from PACER are deposited in a public archive, where they can be retrieved by everyone, at no cost, forever.
So no surprise that US Courts is now discouraging the use of the plugin. They stand to lose a lot of cash if these documents are free.
What surprised me first is this little gem:
A fee exemption applies only for limited purposes. Any transfer of data obtained as the result of a fee exemption is prohibited unless expressly authorized by the court. Therefore, fee exempt PACER customers must refrain from the use of RECAP. The prohibition on transfer of information received without fee is not intended to bar a quote or reference to information received as a result of a fee exemption in a scholarly or other similar work.
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If this is the future of computing as a whole, why should U.S. health IT be an exception? Indeed, given the scientific and ethical complexities of medicine, it is hard to think of any other realm where a commitment to transparency and collaboration in information technology is more appropriate. And, in fact, the largest and most successful example of digital medicine is an open-source program called VistA…
– Phillip Longman, “Code Red“
Open standards are motherhood and apple pie – they ensure a level playing field in which many implementations can compete against each other, keep the barrier to participation low for newcomers, will outlive any given company, and ensure that systems can communicate with each other with a minimum of fuss. In other words, open standards create efficient and durable markets.
Open standards also keep costs low for buyers, who have many options and a minimum of friction when they want to switch from one implementation to another. Because the standard is open, there is no danger of being locked into a single vendor since anyone can create a new implementation against the standard. Since open standards will always exist, there’s no danger of the standard disappearing, becoming unsupported, or being later made proprietary. An open standard will encourage these efficient, durable markets for as long as the standard is useful.
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Our Constitution defines the rules that guide our nation. It was drafted by those who looked around the world of the eighteenth century and saw persecution, torture, and other crimes against humanity and believed that America could be better than that.
– Leon Panetta, “No Torture. No exceptions.“
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Posted 05 January 2009
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I'm the Chief Technology Strategist for the Red Hat US Public Sector group, an open source and free culture advocate, a picky drinker, an amateur aesthete, and a dog enthusiast.
