A reminder why purchasing a simple MP3 player rather than an iPod is important:
Apple told the operator of website bluwiki.com to remove postings that talked about ways to work around a special Apple file, known as iTunesDB. Apple said copyright law prohibited such talk.
“When a lawyer calls you up and implicitly threatens litigation that would bankrupt your little project you obviously have no choice but to comply,” he said. The technology rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken on Odio as a nonpaying client to see if it can protect his freedom to post.
“This is a pure attack on interoperability,” said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer for the Foundation.
He said that, until a year ago, iPods worked well with many kinds of music software. “In October of last year, they added (software) which has no purpose other than to prevent applications other than iTunes from working,” he added.Von Lohmann said court precedents make it clear others have a right to write software for iPods and iPhones.
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I’d call for a boycott on iPods but the fact is, my daughter and son each have one. Sigh. What a shame Apple can’t learn to play nice with others.
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Similar to the Apple computer years ago when they kept their OS to themselves while Bill Gates was selling his OS to everyone making it very popular. Could the same thing happen, or is the iPod too cool?
Similar to the Apple computer years ago when they kept their OS to themselves while Bill Gates was selling his OS to everyone making it very popular. Could the same thing happen, or is the iPod too cool?
Actually, this (digital music) is one of the few areas where Apple doesn’t play so nicely with others.Mac OS X is (for a commercial OS) very open. It can act as a peer with servers and clients of other OSes. And there are a couple of ways you can run other OSes on Apple hardware.Apple’s own productivity apps also “play nicely with others.” Keynote reads and/or writes PowerPoint files Quicktime movie, Flash, PDF, and HTML files. Pages reads and/or writes Word, PDF, RTF and text files. Numbers reads and writes Excel and CSV files. iChat can be used as a client with AOL IM as well as Jabber (open source chat protocol). iCal is based on open calendar standards. …So what’s different about iTunes/iPod? For one thing, Apple has to deal with record companies, who are even less enthusiastic about openness than Apple is. How much pressure Apple gets from them to clamp down on copying I don’t know, but whether we like it or not, the law currently does prohibit technology that allows copying of digitally-protected content, whether we like it or not (or agree with it or not).And of course, underlying all of this philosophizing is the fact that Apple exists to make money. Period. We can project our hopes onto them and wish they would lead the charge toward a more open digital world, but at the end of the day, everything they do is about the bottom line. They are not obligated to sacrifice the bottom line to change the digital world for the better, although in many ways they are.
Actually, this (digital music) is one of the few areas where Apple doesn’t play so nicely with others.Mac OS X is (for a commercial OS) very open. It can act as a peer with servers and clients of other OSes. And there are a couple of ways you can run other OSes on Apple hardware.Apple’s own productivity apps also “play nicely with others.” Keynote reads and/or writes PowerPoint files Quicktime movie, Flash, PDF, and HTML files. Pages reads and/or writes Word, PDF, RTF and text files. Numbers reads and writes Excel and CSV files. iChat can be used as a client with AOL IM as well as Jabber (open source chat protocol). iCal is based on open calendar standards. …So what’s different about iTunes/iPod? For one thing, Apple has to deal with record companies, who are even less enthusiastic about openness than Apple is. How much pressure Apple gets from them to clamp down on copying I don’t know, but whether we like it or not, the law currently does prohibit technology that allows copying of digitally-protected content, whether we like it or not (or agree with it or not).And of course, underlying all of this philosophizing is the fact that Apple exists to make money. Period. We can project our hopes onto them and wish they would lead the charge toward a more open digital world, but at the end of the day, everything they do is about the bottom line. They are not obligated to sacrifice the bottom line to change the digital world for the better, although in many ways they are.