iPad and open access (to what we do)

This June 10 issue of the New York Review of Books includes an interesting article by Sue Alpern "The iPad Revolution" about the iPad which includes a statement that confirms my worries about the Apple strategy, that is to control: Control how can produce content and applications for those gadgets. Thought this might be in the first hand too far off from what we do, but by having somebody that controls what sort of apps there are, we destroy the freedom of the Internet and with that eventually close off one of our real big chance to make our not so well known information accessible.


"The Open Source movement and Creative Commons both derive from the Internet’s essential freedom, a leveling that allows designers and filmmakers and singers and craftsmen and any number of writers, activists, politicians, artists, and entrepreneurs, many of them amateurs, to develop and disseminate their ideas. Imagine what the Internet, and our lives, would be like if, after inventing the Mosaic Web browser back in 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina not only required users to buy it but required payment for every click or download or page view. Try to imagine how a privatized, monetized Internet might have developed, and you can’t, because its evolutionary path would have been so different. Apple’s iPad apps may be ingenious. They may be fun and entertaining. They may be useful. What they can’t be is free of Apple’s control."