Closed Is The New Open

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

Categories: Technology

January 4th, 2010

It’s funny how the open source movement eventually got us to the place where we are now: a point in time when closed became the new open.

And let me explain.

Apple

Exhibit A: the iPhone. It’s an “open platform” – it took control over the phone’s features from the operators and gave it to the users.

But the Apple folks allow people to download apps only from their AppStore. Nowhere else.

And they are banning some of the applications. At times without any good reason.

And they don’t really allow developers access to some of the phone’s capabilities.

So while the iPhone may seem open to some, it definitely looks like an army bootcamp to some of the developers and many of the users.

Google

And  what about Google? The company that invented open. Or at least made a load of PR using it.  The guys that do no evil (or should I say did no evil?).

Guy Kawasaki summarizes nicely a post on Google’s own blog about their openness. They promote open source everywhere they can. They push it forward. They give it out for free.

But then, have you seen their search engine? Have they open sourced it? Or any other of their core technologies for that matter?

Types of Open

Ajit Jaokar wrote about the different types of open, providing 10 possible meanings to the word open. It’s short and to the point.

So when does openness make sense? When it relates to infrastructure that a lot of organizations need to use. Not when it benefits individuals, or even us as a community – companies. This is where the real investment in open source is made, and only when it makes some business sense.

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PS  If you want to read more about it, there’s a great lengthy post by Elad Granot on the subject, focused on the mobile industry over at VisionMobile.