Had it not been for all the work done before on freeBSD or the mach kernel design, if the industry needed to rely on the heavy hand of Patent hounds and closed system advocates, the reincarnation of Apple would not be possible. Indeed, Google its current chief rival, could not scale to what is today, if the reliance on open technologies was not to be found.
Apple is playing a delicate balance between its business interests and the support of the industry as a whole, it releases code to the benefit of the public, I am of the personal opinion that it is not enough.
Like Microsoft before it, we know what the pursuit of the ever higher balance sheet, control of market, can do to innovation and technologies. I think everybody hopes that Apple will not go to that extreme, but the lawsuit against HTC, and the extreme paranoid secrecy in which apple conducts itself gives pause, and make people rightly suspicious.
Of course, in the issue of Flash, it seems fairly clear, proprietary technology company can block another proprietary technology. But the language used in the 3.3.1 is so broad it engulfs other possibilities as well, it is the future of other development platforms that is of concern, not just flash.
Apple is playing a delicate balance between its business interests and the support of the industry as a whole, it releases code to the benefit of the public, I am of the personal opinion that it is not enough.
Like Microsoft before it, we know what the pursuit of the ever higher balance sheet, control of market, can do to innovation and technologies. I think everybody hopes that Apple will not go to that extreme, but the lawsuit against HTC, and the extreme paranoid secrecy in which apple conducts itself gives pause, and make people rightly suspicious.
Of course, in the issue of Flash, it seems fairly clear, proprietary technology company can block another proprietary technology. But the language used in the 3.3.1 is so broad it engulfs other possibilities as well, it is the future of other development platforms that is of concern, not just flash.