the Onda

RRW has a nice piece of how today's hottest developer "platforms" have a degree of closedness which we would have never tolerated, covering the social network sites as well as the iTouch platform. Others have been on this point for a while (for a great read, check out Zittrain's very approachable "The Future of the Internet"), but as we throw our hardware into the tire fire in favor of vendor-controlled "clouds" with little in the way of documented SLAs and APIs, and we pinch our way to glee on the iPhone 3G, it's good to spare a few cycles to folks like Zittrain and Doc who are advocating that we bear a little pain to stay in control.

A friend recently gave me a giant tome worth reading if you think there is nothing we can do, "The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey," which covers the best articles from 20-odd years of the magazine by the same name. The best part of this giant compendium is the section on hacking Ma Bell, the ultimate closed platform from back in the 70s (I discovered that this is where 2600 got its name). Most of these hacks were actually illegal (as they resulted in loss of revenue for the phone company), but the spirit of the endeavors was awesome— and it is interesting to note that this same spirit was then channeled by folks like Woz into the birth of the personal computer industry without which there would be no iPhone today, or even perhaps a commercial Internet. I'd hate to lose this ethic in the name of "democratizing technology" for the mass market.

Last week I installed Linux on a craptop which I'd gotten through work and discovered just how much overhead XP still takes (Ubuntu runs way more smoothly for those interested in a free upgrade to their 2133s). I did it for because I wanted to install Billix (a cool sysadmin swissarmy knife toolset) on a USB stick I carry around and realized that like a frog boiled slowly I had ceded of my locally controlled Linux command lines to VPS accounts to the cloud without realizing it.

Will I drop my Mac-flavored, Quicksilver-enhanced, candy-colored UNIX for daily use in favor of this much more open hardware/software that I control? No way. It's been 5 years since I used a Linux laptop on a daily basis, and even if I could get over the loss of well-integrated, anti-aliased GUIs, I've become far too addicted to adjunct technologies that have emerged since then and are still poorly supported under Linux (802.11n/g, Bluetooth, EVDO cards, etc.), but with my 2133 booting Ubuntu at least I feel like I've got an escape valve when little brother comes knocking.

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