What is Digg?210 Comments
- Philluminati, on 11/21/2007, -4/+92"First of all, this presumes that the Linux (or Open Source) community WANTED to “come up” with the iPhone. I would argue that the community is decidedly NOT interested in that."
The open source software community is interested in software. The iPhone is such a success because it's a beautifully polished Apple product. When people think of the iPhone they think of the touchscreen display or the sexy black finish. Essentially, the iPhone is hardware device. The Apple iPhone software is great but it's built on new hardware. Hardware the FOSS can't really produce. That's why we didn't create the iPhone.
What kind of argument is that anyway? ***** Nokia didn't create the iPhone. - brstilson, on 11/21/2007, -4/+47Next week: The REAL Reason Socrates didn't come up with quantum physics.
- Dradis, on 11/21/2007, -2/+37"only closed development can produce radical, new, technology such as the iPhone"
1) The iPhone is not a radically different piece of technology. Fundamentally it incorporates several pieces of technology that have been around a long time (touch-screen interfaces, for example). It is innovative in its COMBINATION of these technologies, but ultimately it is not that different from many of Nokia's products, which have been around for a long time.
2) The example of MS Vista essentially blows this argument out of the water. Vista tried (and often failed) to successfully include features and technologies that have been incorporated into OSX (built on BSD - open source by the way) and many Linux distros for quite a long time.
3) I would argue that the very decentralized nature of Open Source breeds more 'out of the box' innovative thinking than does closed-source, corporate environments where bureaucracy often stifles creativity and innovation. - gudnbluts, on 11/21/2007, -1/+23It's simpler than all that. Opensource is no good for physical products because of the costs of building, testing and manufacturing. Opensource is good for products where the only cost is time and skill (like software), as they can be freely given without any material loss.
- bradleyland, on 11/21/2007, -2/+19Not to mention, Apple claims that the iPhone is built on top of OS X, which is built on top of open source (Darwin), which is based on the ideas of researchers reaching all the way back to the 70's.
The author of this article hasn't got a clue. - thebellmaster1x, on 11/21/2007, -2/+15Come on, guys, when was the last time people working together of their own volition for no pay came up with something great?
*coughwikipedia* - theurbaninja, on 11/21/2007, -6/+18Am I the only person who thinks that "radical, new, technology such as the iPhone" is a wholly inaccurate description?
- chris9902, on 11/21/2007, -7/+19Isn't OS X built on Unix?... just saying.
- CorpT, on 11/21/2007, -3/+14Yeah. Innovation is so cheap, everyone is doing it all the time. Not expensive at all.
- Azimuth1, on 11/21/2007, -13/+23"In fact, no one needs a cell phone. The world functioned perfectly well before cell phones. We did manage to land people on the moon without cell phones, after all."
Does this guy have any idea how many lives mobile phones have saved? I would argue that someone in dire need of rescue before certain death with nobody within immediate reach *does* in fact, need a mobile phone.
And whether or not the world is functioning well is defined by whether or not we can land people on the moon? What?
I know this isn't the main point of the article, but that sentence annoyed me. - baalzebub, on 11/21/2007, -17/+27thats funny, TrollTech's Greenphone was never released to marketing but it was around long before the iphone, there are lots of other examples of smart-phones that were around long before the iphone, personally i think the iphone is just over-priced fanboy crap, and being tied to AT&T i sure as hell wont buy one, not everybody needs their cellphone to play music & video, some people only want a cellphone for making phone calls, thats all i use a cellphone for is making phone calls, i dont want my cellphone for anything more...
- MrBarcode, on 11/21/2007, -4/+14I would rather get an Open Moko anyway
- Tyr7BE, on 11/21/2007, -9/+19Could someone please explain what is radical and new about the iPhone? I can't think of a single new piece of technology in it. It's pretty, but nothing new.
Oh and PS: the linux community didn't invent the iPhone, but they are largely responsible for large parts of Android, which in most people's books trumps the iPhone (same capabilities, but development is open and sharing is encouraged, rather than having to work around Apple's safeguards to get your own apps running on the iPhone). - silfiriel, on 11/21/2007, -0/+9nobody said open source invented "hot water", open source is what it is, because it's open, it's an option that exists and it's an option that can bear the weight all other OSs can, with no limits what so ever.
- schestowitz, on 11/21/2007, -13/+21Some eriter from the NYT did the same thing recently and many angry readers said they would cancel their subscription as a result. I could link to it, but that would feed the troll.
It's amazing how much people fear change, including Free software.
Yesterday:
http://www.linux.com/feature/121377
"You can try to ban open source software all you want, but if you're buying your infrastructure from Cisco, you're actually employing a lot of Linux. Most security technologies run on top of Linux. You can only ban it so far. Even the people who actually build your equipment are using it." - s810, on 11/21/2007, -0/+8"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"
-Bill Gates in his 1976 "Open Letter to Hobbyists" at the homebrew computer club - adude, on 11/21/2007, -1/+9The problem with that argument is that the world "functioned" for a long time... I know I'm using "slippery slope" argument, but if you continue his line of thought, well we really don't need cars because the world "functioned" before that. And we don't need books and libraries... And pretty soon, we're just cave people again. It's all relative; I know people who say they don't know how they lived before cell phones.
- MWeather, on 11/21/2007, -1/+8The Unix that Apple used is.
- banmaster, on 11/21/2007, -4/+11Ever read the statistics on car crashes caused my mobile phones??
- GMorgan, on 11/21/2007, -0/+7Didn't you read the article (yes, I must be new here), there is nothing innovative about the iPhone. Cry as much as they want, there is nothing that the iPhone does that is remotely interesting in terms of innovation. It is a product, it took things that already existed and polished it. Zero innovation involved.
Innovation is landing on the moon, inventing the wheel, breaking the sound barrier. The iPhone is just a pretty phone, call it innovative if you want but recognise you have simply changed the meaning of the word and innovative is now the norm. - davidrools, on 11/21/2007, -0/+7Open Moko still has the hardware platform developed by FIC and others, just like computer hardware isn't developed in the same open philosophy (though it would be neat if it did)
- 0xception, on 11/21/2007, -1/+8wow that was idiotic... even for a joke.
thank god your not an engineer who designs things then, and if you are what do you work on so i can steer clear of them? - wedgemartin, on 11/21/2007, -2/+9BSD is.
- Raptor007, on 11/21/2007, -1/+7Er, the real reason is that the open source community is not in the business of hardware development. Why are we even making open vs closed source comparisons on a hardware product?
- MrBarcode, on 11/21/2007, -2/+8Not all Unix is open source.
- wedgemartin, on 11/21/2007, -2/+8Which is one of thousands of products Cisco has made. With the exception of a lot of their products historically have run CatOS, IOS has been ported to almost every technology they acquired, and everything developed in house that didn't run CatOS ran IOS. Linux runs on about .02% of their products.
- jubilee123, on 11/21/2007, -0/+6the Linux community didn't come up with the iPhone because....... Apple did.
- MudMan69, on 11/21/2007, -2/+7Many of Cisco's non-router/switch products run on Linux: MARS, IPS, ACNS, CallManager (also runs on Windows), Clean Access, Wireless LAN Controllers, ACS Appliance, etc.
Granted, a significant portion of Cisco's business is still routers and switches, but Linux is running on far more than .02% - gudnbluts, on 11/21/2007, -0/+5OpenMoke and OpenSparc are both completely commercial products. They just happen to be designed with/for open source software. The point I was making was that development of the hardware will always be commercial, so saying "the opensource community couldn't invent the iphone" doesn't really make sense. It's like saying Beethoven was stupid because he could never have come up with the theory of relativity. The problem is that the question the article asks encapsulates two things which are completely separate - hardware and software.
The real question is, would the iPhone have been as good if its software had been opensource? And the answer is probably, in some ways hell yes (it would have been compatible with everything under the sun, for instance). Hardware doesn't need to be tied to software, as it says in the article. That's what PCs are all about for instance - they run more than one type of OS, many different software packages that can utilise the same hardware. I can switch my motherboard for a hundred others and it will still work with all that software. - fugazi, on 11/21/2007, -2/+7I'm expecting to be killed because of this but does anyone have any type of innovative product (software included) that they can link to?
- enicholas, on 11/21/2007, -3/+8Extremely ignorant comment. Mac OS X has its own:
* Kernel (XNU)
* init replacement (launchd)
* Bootloader (BootX)
* Graphics Library (Quartz)
* User Interface (Aqua)
* Filesystem (HFS+)
* Libraries (Carbon, Cocoa, Core Foundation, Core Audio, Core Animation, etc.)
* Applications (Safari, Mail, iCal, Address Book, iTunes, Stickies, iChat, and on and on)
To suggest that all they did was slap a coat of gloss on BSD is just asinine. The actual portion of the OS which is Unix is quite small. XNU has Unix and Mach ancestry, the basic low-level system APIs are Unix, and the command-line utilities are Unix (but the vast majority of these are simply bundled with the OS rather than integral to its operation). That's about it. It's not using X Windows, Gnome, or any of the other high-level stuff you would typically find on a Unix system.
As far as I'm concerned Apple did exactly right. Unix's subsystem and command line are great, and there's really no point in throwing them away and inventing something new just for the heck of it. But once you get to the higher-level Unix stuff like X Windows and Gnome, well... in my opinion Apple borrowed exactly right amount of code from those as well (none). - MWeather, on 11/21/2007, -0/+5Yeah, running everything as Root in the first place causes much less problems.
- jellygraph, on 11/21/2007, -3/+8Sorry, whats innovative about the iPhone? It doesn't even have removable memory. It's about as useful as an iPaq Smart phone, and that came out long before. The only interesting thing they've done is design a minimalist interface and touchscreen keypad and then wrapped it up into a shiny package.
I like my iPhone, but innovative it is not. It's just old technology in a nice fancy package. - wedgemartin, on 11/21/2007, -0/+5Sorry. I meant to respond to MWeather7's comment on ACNS using Linux..
- hexydes, on 11/21/2007, -0/+5Uhm, this is just a stupid concept. If anything, you could argue that small projects (which generally comprise the majority of the open-source community, barring a few examples) can't come up with something like this, because you need lots of time and money to produce something like the iPhone. I don't know if this is a truth or not, but it certainly has to be closer than the point the original writer was attempting to make...
Anyway, in the open-source community, you generally don't get revolutionary ideas, because the development process is iterative, in that everything is built on something else, which is built on something else, repeat ad nauseum. The only reason "revolutionary" developments come in the closed-source world is because the market generally stagnates and rallies behind a "safe" paradigm, until someone (in this case Apple) breaks that mold and comes up with something new. In open-source, you're free to download the new version of the product whenever you want, compile it, check it out, and go from there. The development is all out in the open, and thus, seems to move slowly.
Open and closed source design models are actually very similar in the end; there are slight deviations on how you arrive there, but in general, you get there either way, in a similar fashion. - giant.robot, on 11/21/2007, -0/+4OSX is based in part on BSD Unix. Hmm Unix I wonder where that was...oh yeah that's right it was developed at AT&T's Bell labs. Even Unix wasn't that original as it was a reduced feature derivative of MULTICS. There's a lot of recycling that happens in the computing industry and computer science in general. Often times it is absurd to point at something and claim that group X is ripping off group Y, group Y likely ripped off their idea from group Z.
For the most part the open source community is a cloning community. The whole reason for the GNU project's founding was to create an open source clone of Unix. BSD Unix started off requiring a license for AT&T Unix but eventually ended up being an entirely clean clone of AT&T's Unix. Most of the early FOSS projects targeted for BSD Unix and Linux were copies of existing closed source products. GNOME and KDE began life as a clone of CDE/Motif. A lot of the ideas that go into these OSS projects are lifted directly from their closed source inspiration/competition. As this happens in both directions it is silly to vilify either side for their behavior. - CrazyDave303, on 11/21/2007, -0/+4And the most of the reason it's big is because it's from Apple.
- jellygraph, on 11/21/2007, -0/+4The iPhone runs FreeBSD... Open Source did make the iPhone possible. Perhaps not the GPL v2, but the BSD license certainly did.
- 0xception, on 11/21/2007, -2/+6sooo are you saying mass production of a product was their innovation?
@ Tyr7BE
By the way the Android project looks fantastic! i can't wait for some products that dont cost 600 bucks plus 2 year contract w/ data connection to use it. - biggbrother, on 11/22/2007, -1/+5There was Linux-style package management for OS X before there was for Linux? I doubt it.
There were live CD's (legal or not) for OS X or Windows before there were for Linux? I doubt it.
Innovation means being first.
Just admit it...there's a lot of innovation in Linux whether or not you choose to run a different operating system. - tech42er, on 11/21/2007, -1/+5It's not that hard to program.
- tech42er, on 11/21/2007, -0/+4With all due respect, you can't deny that the world functioned just fine before cell phones. I'm not a Luddite (in fact I love new, emerging tech), but the world could survive without cell phones, if it came to that.
- thebellmaster1x, on 11/21/2007, -0/+4Yes, but who is writing Linux? Not anybody. It's people who actually possess that skill and have the ability to contribute.
Who writes Wikipedia? Ideally, it's people who actually possess knowledge (this excludes vandals, of course, who--also ideally--do not have their words placed in the final product) and have the ability to contribute.
Both are open source and analogous to each other:
Knowledge --> Wikipedia
Programming skills --> Linux
The first is great; why do we have people assuming that the second cannot be? It's the same concept. - OrangeTide, on 11/21/2007, -0/+4Yes but Apple uses gcc, and open source compiler, to compile the software for their iPhone product.
- init100, on 11/22/2007, -0/+4"BSD, as in Berkley Software Distribution, is not open source."
It isn't? - Stevo23, on 11/21/2007, -2/+6Um, since when is the iPhone "radical, new technology"? It's just a really nice phone combined with an mp3 player. The gramophone, the walkman, those were radical new technologies.
- inactive, on 11/21/2007, -0/+4It's based on FreeBSD
- inactive, on 11/21/2007, -0/+4The difference between Wikipedia and, say, Linux is that if someone disagrees with or wants to add to a Wikipedia article, it goes affects the main project. If someone wants to add sharks with lasers into Linux, it wouldn't go into Red Hat or Debian, it would go into SharksWithLasersOS, which would affect people far less. Then, if the Debian maintainers thought it was a good idea they could integrate it themselves.
You know the provenance of a major Linux distro, wheras you don't immediately know the provenance of a Wikipedia article without perusing the edits section. - thebellmaster1x, on 11/21/2007, -1/+5No profit incentive.
- technoredneck, on 11/21/2007, -0/+4No, I'm right with you on that one, dude.
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