"In reality we think the open vs closed argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue which is: what's best for the customer, fragmented or integrated?
We think Android is very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day. We prefer integrated so the user doesn't have to be the systems integrator."
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Stark has been called a leader in the global free culture movement and is a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, a Lecturer in Computer Science at Yale University, and a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation. A graduate of Harvard Law School, she performed research for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
“Now that given the Facebook privacy issues were on the cover of, for example, Time magazine, it is getting a lot of mainstream coverage that it hadn't previously.”
There’s no doubt that Stark sees fellow Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg as leading a closed media ecosystem that threatens freedom, but Facebook isn’t the only cloud on the Horizon. Stark says Apple’s recent censorship looms large as a threat to the free culture movement.
“Apple's market cap now exceeds Microsoft's, so they are really on a power trip. “
Just as Facebook runs a closed system with total control, Steve Jobs and the Apple ecosystem make all the rules for their users.
Stark explains: “having somebody like Steve Jobs as the ultimate arbiter of what apps can get in and out is an incredibly bad thing for freedom -- not only freedom but for innovation.“
“Even Bill Gates and Windows was open to such that anybody could develop an app for the Windows operating system. It's not like Bill Gates was sitting there saying, "Yes, no, yes, no. Steve Jobs doesn't really want to be told what to do. Steve just wants to write the rules.”
The problem is that, of course, users like Apple products, and they like ease of use and the reliability of the safe software on the iPhone and now the iPad. So what are the trade-offs and what are we willing to accept?
“Steve Jobs is not only incredibly obsessed with ensuring the user experience, making sure that the app works, making sure that doesn't crash, making sure that it's designed well. It’s hard to have a problem with that."
But Apple has gone farther than technical quality, limiting apps from a wide community of makers including “…journalists and people engaging in political activism, satirists, an app that would measure cell phone radiation, an app that would count down until the number of days when Bush was no longer president. As Steve Jobs, I believe famously said it would alienate half of his customers to accept that app.”
“There's a problem for free expression from speech when Steve Jobs is making that determination. Probably most apps are approved and they're innocuous. But when Steve Jobs says you can't have a nipple and there's a breast cancer app, what happens?”
For Stark the choice is clear, “My answer for this? I'm an Android user.”
Read more:
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-steve-jobs-web-freedom-2010-6#ixzz12o97J04A
