Nick sez, "Jonathan Zittrain gets so many things right in his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It about what he calls 'generative technology' and why it's so important. It's chock-full of all sorts of issues that make Boingers salivate – freedom of speech, copyright, open source software, digital rights activism, privacy, censorship – put together into a very convincing argument in favor of unbridled innovation.
This is definitely a book that you don't want to pass up. It's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license and freely downloadable from the book's website."
The iPhone is the opposite. It is sterile. Rather than a platform that invites innovation,
the iPhone comes preprogrammed. You are not allowed to add programs
to the all-in-one device that Steve Jobs sells you. Its functionality is locked
in, though Apple can change it through remote updates. Indeed, to those who
managed to tinker with the code to enable the iPhone to support more or different
applications,4 Apple threatened (and then delivered on the threat) to transform
the iPhone into an iBrick.5 The machine was not to be generative beyond the innovations
that Apple (and its exclusive carrier, AT&T) wanted. Whereas the world
would innovate for the Apple II, only Apple would innovate for the iPhone. (A
promised software development kit may allow others to program the iPhone with
Apple's permission.)Jobs was not shy about these restrictions baked into the iPhone. As he said at
its launch:We define everything that is on the phone. . . . You don't want your phone to be like
a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then
you go to make a call and it doesn't work anymore. These are more like iPods than
they are like computers.6
(Thanks, Nick!)
