Quote:
Originally Posted by CommonReader
Amazon and Apple are two peas in a pod; creating their own standards to suppress competition.
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Or outrun the competition. (just dont call their products standards; the misuse of the term is part of what is at issue.)
Bear in mind that there is no law of man or nature that forbids proprietary solutions. Historically, proprietary solutions are faster to ramp up, more agile in responding to market needs, and (obviously) more consistent.
Open competition is up to the communitarian/open forces that bear the onus of creating/maintaining competitive open solutions. Don't expect for-profit organizations to sacrifice anything meaningful in the name of open-ness.
Apple itself said it best just this week;
Quote:
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“We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/bu...pagewanted=all
Substitute "epub" for "america" and their position is clear.
And, bear in mind that, while Apple has *never* been a company I care for--I don't like that too much of their business is about milking the unwary, since day one--there are *perfectly valid* reasons for them to do a proprietary solution. (Simple test: how soon will an actual epub3 product hit the market? Amazon already has 4-5 million KF8-capable gadgets out on the street. Apple, at least 30 million iPads. If only 10% are actually used for iBooks, that is still 3 million.)
The whole open-ness issue is essentially a commons problem: everybody wants the *benefits* of an open spec but nobody wants the cost of upholding and defending it.
And so we have an outright and brazen hijack. Or two. Or ten.
In software, most of the big, successful efforts have big, powerful backers capable of defending the project; for all its IP issues, you don't see somebody wrapping Android in proprietary wrappers to make it incompatible and then calling it something else, do you?
Fires, Nooks and Sony's don't deny they run Android even when, like the Nook Tablet, they do everything they can to close up the hardware. Google would not stand for it.
Ditto with Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc.
The stakehoders and supporters of *those* open efforts watch and protect their product. Lawsuits *have* been filed. Abusers *have* been slapped down. Linux-based readers like the Hanlins and Pocketbooks have been asked to publish their source code and they *have* complied.
If you benefit from open systems you *should* live up to the rules of the system.
But if the system you are leveraging has *no* rules and *no* enforcement...
(shrug)
I keep saying it is not Apple that is at fault here; They have done nothing illegal. (Ethically-challenged, yes. But illegal, no.)
They're just smooth operators taking advantage of the naive and unwary.
Sometimes you *do* have to blame the "victim".
And in this case the "victims" should have known this was coming.