10 ms·

The Pendulum Swings, Again

284 points by hawke 14y ago

alexro 14y ago
If tomorrow the government suggested to licence software businesses so that if a consumer had trouble with a program or a website the responsible party would get in trouble, 99% of the population would vote it up. So much about everyone wanting to keep stuff open. For the most education means getting a place in the vertical, not being curious. So far as everyone else is limited, 99% won't have a problem with it. iProduct and facebook are the obvious examples. How do we keep it our way? The only answer I'm having is: by becoming billionaires and putting the money to work for the "open" ignoring any other commercial incentives.
kamme 14y ago
The most interesting fact for this swing is that it's not only software that is changing... As noted in the article: if you wanted a computer in the old days, you put it together yourself. That changed and putting together a new computer yourself is unimaginable (I'm not speaking about assembly of components, but soldering the whole thing). Recently cheap(er) 3D printing, Arduino and the Raspberry Pi put hardware on the table again and I think very interesting times are coming. Think about it, even 2 or 3 years ago 'innovation' on the internet was synonym with software, now it's changing again to hard- and software.
- ivix 14y ago
  Not at all. Hardware is becoming more and more obscure. 5 years ago many people could and did swap components in their PC. Now try doing that with a modern smartphone or laptop. Don't confuse the chatterings online about RPi etc with any kind of general movement. The vast majority of computer users now use sealed hardware boxes, and that proportion is increasing.
  - rolux 14y ago
    5 years ago many people could and did swap components in their PC. Now try doing that with a modern smartphone or laptop. Do you think this is an entirely new development? Wouldn't the statement "5 years ago people could do X with computers, now they can't" in fact hold true for the last, say, 40 years in the history of computing?
    - chii 14y ago
      But the argument here is about the specific property of black boxes. Computers in the olden days tend not to be hermetically sealed black boxes.
  - loup-vaillant 14y ago
    Well, Rpi etc could lead the way. Not as they are of course, but that could improve. One way I can think of is memristors, which could make FPGA-like hardware ubiquitous. This would push the software/hardware frontier so low that there would be effectively little magic left.
  - veridies 14y ago
    Do we care? I'm personally much happier with open software and formats, but my Ubuntu laptop can easily read a .docx written by MS Office a Windows 8 machine. I can run many programs and games under WINE. And I can still tweak whatever I like. Meanwhile, people too busy, uninterested, and uneducated to want to change anything can use a simple, elegant, functional platform. As long as our software is continually developed and is supported (which is why UEFI is so scary), I don't see why we should object to black box computers.
- fcatalan 14y ago
  In fact the GPU on the rPi doesn't even have open source drivers or a public specification, you have to use the provided binary blob if you want all the goodies.
- daralthus 14y ago
  I see your point with the 3d printing revolution but imho the two most important sentences in the article are: The line between ‘computer’, ‘program’ and ‘media’ blurred to the point where consumers were successfully confused about what it was they were actually buying. ... another where it is successfully co-opted by big money and governments in a concerted effort to give us all a subscription to online Life-As-A-Service where you will be beholden to some party for the ability to gain access to knowledge, information, the right to communicate and so on and where the act of programming will be as tightly regulated as the export of cryptography was. So if you look at it closely: This swing is not only about hardware and software anymore. It is much more about data and the services that it enables. Think of facebook, google etc.
trg2 14y ago
Those who lived through that period and paid attention are probably well aware of the ridiculous notion that information flows should be controlled in order to protect the children or whatever the fig-leaf of the day is. Ask the Iranian and the Chinese people how they like their firewalls. Well played, sir.
kintamanimatt 14y ago
Those who lived through that period and paid attention are probably well aware of the ridiculous notion that information flows should be controlled in order to protect the children or whatever the fig-leaf of the day is. Ask the Iranian and the Chinese people how they like their firewalls. Let’s make sure it ends up on the side of freedom and democracy, and not on the side of DRM and other forms of control and digital oppression. If my observations are correct then such a swing is about to happen, and this time we had better get it right. The author states the concern and the desirable outcome, but how do we, individually, make sure the pendulum swings in the correct direction?
- RobAley 14y ago
  The simplest way is through the use of your wallet. Buy "open". E.g. - Need a new desktop? Buy one that doesn't lock down uefi by default, and runs linux compatible hardware - New phone? Buy one with Firefox OS if you can wait that long, or at least go for one with a stock Android install - New book? Buy one from independent publishers/authors who don't support DRM [1] - New app? Don't use a commercial app store, get it direct from the publisher - Music? you get the idea. Voting with your wallet and putting money on the side of open helps keep commercial operators swinging in that direction. As far as government is concerned, I've no idea. [1] Swift plug : http://leanpub.com http://leanpub.com for books, in particular http://leanpub.com/php http://leanpub.com/php .... [edit] In response to the assorted "we're too small a minority" comments below, I would argue that historically with IT that isn't an issue. The internet & web were minority pursuits at one point, commercial walled gardens like AOL were much more common and popular, until the small minority of tech leaders (just like us) forged ahead anyway and showed with our feet how much better it can be. The people reading HN, while comparatively small in number compared to the general population, I think underestimate the power they (and others like them) have to influence the tech lives of their customers, users, friends and family. It doesn't always appear that common sense can beat big money when it comes to affecting the choices made by the general populous, but have some faith in your fellow humanity, these sways are usually only temporary.
  - mikecane 14y ago
    >>>New book? Buy one from independent publishers/authors who don't support DRM [1] You must have forgotten the raging battle between Doctorow and the eBookstores. He and his publisher didn't want DRM, but the stores did. This is part of the point the writer is making about the pendulum swinging.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
It's an interesting view of history, but without providing your reasoning for why you think the pendulum is about to swing again I have to assume that it is not.
- rolux 14y ago
  I agree. While I can follow the author's reasoning about the history of computing (particularly his assertion that computing was most democratic in the 1980s), he doesn't reveal the sources for his optimism, apart from stating: If my observations are correct then such a swing is about to happen, and this time we had better get it right. The interesting part, which is missing, would be a list of such observations.
  - mikecane 14y ago
    The iPad being seen as a store for Apple. The Kindles being seen as a store for Amazon. The Nook being seen as a store for Barnes & Noble. Those are just three too damned obvious examples that are totally against the grain of the history of computing he -- and I -- lived through. That's part of the pendulum right there. Also, writers and publishers and musicians not wanting DRM but the stores -- Apple, Amazon, et al -- insisting on it. Another pendulum swing. You wind up not even having total control over your own product. Fake DRM takedowns to stifle competition (see the Vinted thing with Kickstarter). The battle over whether GPS tracking does or doesn't require a court order. All the evidence is out there and I'm surprised any of you need someone else to create such a list. And, shit, I'm a writer and I now want to learn JavaScript because I think something like Open webOS (or the Mozilla OS) is the future we'll all be running towards for technological self-defense and freedom. The path we're currently on is a noose that can hang all of us.
    - a_c_s 14y ago
      But there is no DRM for music in Apple's store (it was dropped entirely in 2009), and Amazon sells DRM free music too.
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
rolux 14y ago
Remember that there are two possible outcomes, one where the internet successfully manages to cause a swing to the edge of freedom, and another where it is successfully co-opted by big money and governments in a concerted effort to give us all a subscription to online Life-As-A-Service where you will be beholden to some party for the ability to gain access to knowledge, information, the right to communicate and so on and where the act of programming will be as tightly regulated as the export of cryptography was. It seems so me that in the 1990s, the future that was widely (outside some truly dystopian sci-fi fringes of the net discourse) regarded as the worst-case scenario was the Internet becoming like radio -- i.e. another peer-to-peer medium turned into a broadcast medium. So it may be worth noting that while the best-case scenario hasn't changed much since then, the worst-case scenario has.
- pgeorgi 14y ago
  well, sounds about right: Facebook is the radio station, and the users are participating in their call-in show. And for some demographics, the internet isn't much more than Facebook and Wikipedia for their homework (as data source, not to contribute).
- justinmk 14y ago
  > you will be beholden to some party for [...] the right to communicate This is the most poignant insight in the article. For some decades now, it has been accepted--with minimal opposition--that we are beholden to some party (the state) for the right to travel. Then it is not far-fetched to imagine that in some decades, the right to communicate may be popularly regarded as a mere "privilege" which is granted by the generosity of the state. We accept random searches at airports, centralized driver licensing, red light cameras, etc. The legislature already flirts with the digital equivalents of those concepts.
  - gaius 14y ago
    That is why the Founding Fathers were opposed to the idea of a Bill of Rights. Because they knew people would come to believe their rights were granted by the document, instead of merely being non-exhaustively listed in it.
bad_user 14y ago
The most interesting thing about these recent trends is human nature. I remember back in year 2000/2001 how everybody was talking about freedom, open-source and the open nature of the Internet. I remember how the closed garden that Microsoft tried to create was frowned upon. Small companies that were picking the Internet as a delivery platform and using open-source/multi-platform technologies were on the forefront of innovation. Of course regular consumers and businesses never cared, but as Paul Graham once said, if you want to see the future trends in computing, you have to look at what hackers are using today. Then OS X happened, this UNIX-compatible OS that was shiny and cool and all of your UNIX tools were compatible with it and you could run some pretty important proprietary software too, like MS Office or Photoshop. It was more productive for developers than Windows. Compared to Linux it was friendlier to all people. And suddenly Apple was hip again and it slowly captured the hearts of developers. Then the iPhone happened and people didn't mind that it was a closed garden, because there has never been anything like it. Anything that Apple allowed on this new platform, it was taken as a gift, as it was their platform, so if they wanted to ban an app for "duplicating existing functionality" then openness be damned, it was their product after all. Then the stories about lone developers getting rich on the App Store happened, and people didn't mind being at the behest of Apple, as long as they could have some piece of that awesome pie. Of course, countless of reasons were given by tech pundits, trying to rationalize the walled garden they've created - it is better for grandmas that have their PCs ridden with viruses, it is better for the protection of our children, it exposes computing to a wider mass (even though computing in this context means mostly consumption), it solves the problem of app marketing for individual developers without huge marketing budgets, etc... there's always some reason for why Apple was right to act the way it did. Even now that they've released a shitty GMaps replacement, some genuinely believe that they had no choice, when for a company like Apple there are always choices available. Let's not forget for a moment the ultimate argument against this closed garden: if you don't like it, you are free to go somewhere else. And now Apple started suing left and right, which in my opinion is what companies do when finding themselves in the innovator's dilemma, and is doing so while dropping the ball on new versions of its products. They are still successful and they might produce some more golden eggs in the future, but the innovation frenzy of the iPod era is over and they know it. And yet people still cheer for them, even though as far as openness is concerned, Apple makes Microsoft look good. And it was only 12 years ago that people hated Microsoft with a passion for being an obstacle to innovation, even though Microsoft never banned any app from running on Windows or restricted its usage only to certain hardware (but surprise, since Apple has been doing it so successfully, Microsoft is going to start doing it with Windows 8 ... hurray for the renewed and totally not evil Microsoft). I own an Android phone and an iPad. I love my iPad, but it was a gift and I secretly yearn for a Nexus tablet that has the same size + 3G. I also voted with my wallet against apps like Instagram, because I'm primarily an Android user and the aesthetic senses of developers like Marco don't really solve any my problems. I also remember the day I got my Galaxy S, even though I owned an iPhone 3GS ... I got out of my way to buy one out of frustration because Apple was banning apps for blocking calls and SMS messages from specific phone numbers (but hey, look how it "just works"). And I predict similar frustration levels as use-cases for my iPad are unfolding. Already I'm pretty pissed off about my carrier having the ability to enable/disable the tethering option on my iPad. If this is the future of computing, then I shudder to think of the consequences.
snooblywoobly 14y ago
I think the comments on hacker news, in general, need to be a little more tolerant of ambiguity. Just because a statement is not immediately verifiable or is imprecise, it does not mean that it is without worth. The scientific method is a way of verifying our intuition, it is not in and of itself the one true route to all knowledge.
__Joker 14y ago
The freedom we got was a by product or say side effect of computing pheonemenon rather that we actively sought it. I don't think people en masse would like the freedom right now. Most of the people will be happy with the service vs. privacy-freedom compromise we are getting today. I don't want to belabour the point of Google as service and Apple as service.
bloaf 14y ago
a similar thing using hardware had happened in the 80’s with so called ‘dongles’, typically for expensive programs such as CAD software I can think of at least one software package which still uses physical dongles.
ReadEvalPost 14y ago
I know there's a lot of hype around the Raspberry Pi, but it's interesting that you would mention it as a key component of open systems when it's a perfect example of half-closed: * The BCM2835, the microprocessor used on the board, is not available to be purchased by hobbyists * The full data sheet for the BCM2835 is not available without signing an NDA with Broadcom (and presumably that only happens when you have a commercial application) * A schematic is available, but not the PCB layout * The GPU drivers are a binary blob The Beagleboard and the Arduino are much better examples of open hardware.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  Those are excellent points, when I get home later I'll update the article. That's a big oversight on my part, thank you.
kris_lander 14y ago
Whilst the article mentions how countries like China restrict access to communication networks we should be under no illusions that nearly all major communication networks are ultimately still under the control of central government wherever you live. For the pendulum to permanently swing in favour of "freedom and democracy" we need a genuinely open network. Without an open network open devices, operating systems, software, etc could easily be neutered, if albeit in a rather draconian fashion by hitting the "off" switch. This can seem unlikely in any "free" nation, however this was almost a reality last year during the London riots. As those in power openly lamented the use of Blackberry's BBM network by the rioters (and various other communication networks) it was clear that the government came very close to ordering the service shutdown and I have no doubt it would have been had things deteriorated any further. Perhaps the great next swing might be those attempting to create decentralized mesh networks? One can hope.
- nacker 14y ago
  I agree 100%! This is the main point that the article misses. Open hardware and open software are completely useless if the networks are not open. The open internet as we know it would never have happened unless it had been provided by thousands of tiny ISPs. The most worrying pendulum swing of all is the consolidation of all traffic into a few giants like Comcast per country. Mesh networking is the next frontier for openness.
jonnathanson 14y ago
The relative ubiquity of the internet is an important consideration here. In previous swings of the pendulum, computing (and/or the internet) was concentrated among a much smaller base of users, many of whom had strongly vested interests in the side to which the pendulum was swinging. These days, the internet is certainly ubiquitous, and "smart" mobile devices are basically ubiquitous, if not yet entirely so. And the vast majority of today's users don't seem to care about privacy, open vs. closed ecosystems, etc. The sheer volume of users who either don't know, or don't care, about these things shifts a LOT of power into the hands of the current power players in the status quo. Hackers and power users are still major forces for change, and always will be. And, in time, they may prevail by offering better solutions to the masses. But the weight of the masses is heavier than it ever has been. I submit that the fulcrum on which the hackers will tilt the masses isn't security, privacy, or anything of that nature. It's openness, and by proxy, IP management. It's the free transmission (or lack thereof) of ideas, information, and content. It's the interoperability (or lack thereof) of all of these things between devices and systems, outside the restrictions or central control of one or two major parties. But the force currently arrayed against the growth of openness is a powerful one. It's convenience. And convenience is, arguably, THE most powerful driver in human psychology. Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, telecoms, and other players in the content space are making plays to become total-solution providers. And the appeal of a one-stop, total solution (the Walmart Effect, if you will) is quite powerful to the masses. To overcome this appeal, the next great disruption will need to equate openness with convenience. Open must = easy. More precisely, open must be more highly correlated with ease than walled gardens are correlated with ease. An historical side note: AOL's monopoly in the ISP game, which lasted for so many years, came about because AOL offered the easiest, most idiot-proof, and most convenient internet experience. It was a walled garden, but beyond the wall, the typical user just saw a massive, untamed jungle full of complex systems, wonky communities, and seemingly insurmountable technical difficulties. AOL fell when people figured out how to make the world outside the wall more ordered, more appealing, and more uniformly approachable. Open standards had a lot to do with this. So did the appearance of portals, which represented a less daunting half-step between the Great Untamed Wild and the AOL garden. And search engines continued this evolution, making the point of entry into most users' internet experience very centralized, orderly, and convenient without walling everything up. Search engines created the subconscious appearance of a walled garden without actually erecting walls.
protomyth 14y ago
I think the article misses one of the fundamental reasons that mobile is a closed environment: fear. It seems we treat things we can put in our pocket as more personal and much different than the twilight zone we expect out of computers. I am sure, at some point, a program uploaded the Outlook address book of some Fortune 500 sales manager to the internet without telling him/her. Any problem or security breach in the PC world is a 1-day story. The same thing happens on a mobile platform (iPhone) and C-level executives are dragged in front of Congress. I gotta tell you, if its a choice between programmer's rights and being dragged in front of Congress because some startup didn't use proper hashing, I would, as a CEO, limit programmers. Pure, simple, and a smart decision for 99.9% of my customers. I will bet if Google has more executives "requested" at Congressional Hearings then side-loading will disappear. The post-PC devices are going to be locked down in the name of security. There is no downside to executives. Some developers will put up with it because of the money just like they did in the pre-iPhone days of mobile deployment. I hate this because I know if I'd been born 20 years later, I would not be a developer. High Schools are not teaching programming anymore and the computers I learned to program on (Atari 400, C64, TI 99/4A) have no modern replacements (sub $200 with development tools included / available cheap). Someone wants to change all this? Then build a modern day Atari 800 / C64. Not OLPC, because you cannot just buy one of those. Something I can hook to the internet and an old TV (since now most families have bought the 2nd generation of HDMI devices). Something that lets me program it.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  > I think the article misses one of the fundamental reasons that mobile is a closed environment: fear. It seems we treat things we can put in our pocket as more personal and much different than the twilight zone we expect out of computers. Mobile is closed because Apple is closed, were wildly successful when they entered the market, and everyone else followed suit. There success wasn't due to the closed nature, but as is always the case, it became the standard way of doing things.
  - adestefan 14y ago
    Mobile is closed because the network providers are terrified of letting devices that they cannot control on their network.
stevewilhelm 14y ago
During the entire period of time the author discusses, most of your critical information has been stored in proprietary, walled gardens: your health records, financial transactions, telephone communication records, etc. If anything, it is getting worse. For example, if one has a cable "triple play" package: all of your web surfing, phone calls & SMS, and television viewing history is recorded and owned by one company. The fact that the edge devices are "open" is moot.
benjamincburns 14y ago
Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club [1] represent! Back in 2006 I started a similar project to TuxPhone that I dubbed OpenCell [2]. I'd been working with GSM modules for a while, and my motivation was "This WinMo phone I have sucks. I sure do hate carrying around a cell phone, MP3 player, and camera all the time - I know I could build one device that'd just do it all." Unfortunately as a student I didn't have the funds to see this to the point of reality, and the iPhone was launched in January 2007, essentially making my effort look like a steaming pile of shit. That said, technology has come a long, long way since then. 3D printing, inexpensive reflow soldering equipment, and stacked DDR packages make this goal pretty attainable compared to when I launched my efforts. I'd love, love, love to see efforts like this revived. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Homebrew_Mobile_Phone_Club [2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20080927003526/http://widgetry.org/dokuwiki/doku.php
rsync 14y ago
Before you worry about the pendulum of mobile app ecosystems, perhaps it's worth stepping back a few layers of abstraction, and look at the pendulum of the physical, human-human interface layer. None of us own our own real property (property tax) - you don't even own your own car (required registration fees even for "planned nonoperation"). You (likely) don't create any of your own food, and are bound by law to carry and present ID. So ... what ? We build our perfect little RMS style open computing world, while we are renters and debtors at the lower layers of our "societal stack".
creat0 14y ago
I fail to see a qualitative difference between "mobile", "laptop", "desktop" or "stovetop". Those are just form factors. They are all computers. We can put a computer inside almost anything nowadays. What matters to me besides what's on the motherboard are peripherals, drivers and access to networks. Things got smaller. We all knew they would. But they should not become less functional. (Hello Apple.)
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genbattle 14y ago
This may just be me picking on one small part of the entire post, but I have a serious technical problem with some of the author's claims, not least of which is his feelings that FPGAs will somehow revolutionize personal computing. Anyone who has programmed with an FPGA will understand the sort of tasks they're best for; hand-optimizing particular algorithms and processes into parallel pipelines and execution units. Running a general-purpose OS on a CPU built in software on top of an FPGA is just not feasible; the yeild of transistors to logic units is very low for FPGAs compared to conventional microprocessors; and there's matters of efficiency, layout, and cost-effectiveness to think of. There has been some success using an FPGA-type programmable gate array in combination with a standard CPU, but the CPU itself is usually a proprietary core made to coordinate and assist the FPGA. These sorts of FPGA co-processors are only ever used for very specialized aplications currently. They won't be replacing general-purpose dedicated CPUs anytime soon (if ever). FPGAs are perfectly suitable for any special-purpose functions they've been programmed for: but I think in terms of desktop and mobile computing, having a farm of parallel execution units in the form of a modern GPU will also yield acceptable results for any parallel consumer applications without the need for as much investment as with dedicated reprogrammable FPGA hardware. The other technical concern I have is mesh networks; we don't currently have the technology to create and maintain large-scale mesh networks, but even if we did, there is a point there the communication required just to maintain the network outpaces the node-to-node bandwidth, or even the global bandwidth available. You also have to deal with privacy concerns around data storage and transmission at nodes while it is en-route to a destination, and circle-of-trust issues, etc. These issues bring the pendulum in a full circle. I agree that the pendulum does seem to be in a state of change at the moment, and all that is keeping it from swinging back (and probably giving it more overall momentum in the progress) is government and business interests. I think the issues we face, and that we have always faced, are not so much technical as they are social and societal. By the time we solve the issues around the commons, ownership, and governance; the technical issues will seem trivial.

284 points by hawke 14y ago

If tomorrow the government suggested to licence software businesses so that if a consumer had trouble with a program or a website the responsible party would get in trouble, 99% of the population would vote it up. So much about everyone wanting to keep stuff open. For the most education means getting a place in the vertical, not being curious. So far as everyone else is limited, 99% won't have a problem with it. iProduct and facebook are the obvious examples. How do we keep it our way? The only answer I'm having is: by becoming billionaires and putting the money to work for the "open" ignoring any other commercial incentives.

kamme 14y ago

The most interesting fact for this swing is that it's not only software that is changing... As noted in the article: if you wanted a computer in the old days, you put it together yourself. That changed and putting together a new computer yourself is unimaginable (I'm not speaking about assembly of components, but soldering the whole thing). Recently cheap(er) 3D printing, Arduino and the Raspberry Pi put hardware on the table again and I think very interesting times are coming. Think about it, even 2 or 3 years ago 'innovation' on the internet was synonym with software, now it's changing again to hard- and software.

ivix 14y ago
Not at all. Hardware is becoming more and more obscure. 5 years ago many people could and did swap components in their PC. Now try doing that with a modern smartphone or laptop. Don't confuse the chatterings online about RPi etc with any kind of general movement. The vast majority of computer users now use sealed hardware boxes, and that proportion is increasing.
- rolux 14y ago
  5 years ago many people could and did swap components in their PC. Now try doing that with a modern smartphone or laptop. Do you think this is an entirely new development? Wouldn't the statement "5 years ago people could do X with computers, now they can't" in fact hold true for the last, say, 40 years in the history of computing?
  - chii 14y ago
    But the argument here is about the specific property of black boxes. Computers in the olden days tend not to be hermetically sealed black boxes.
- loup-vaillant 14y ago
  Well, Rpi etc could lead the way. Not as they are of course, but that could improve. One way I can think of is memristors, which could make FPGA-like hardware ubiquitous. This would push the software/hardware frontier so low that there would be effectively little magic left.
- veridies 14y ago
  Do we care? I'm personally much happier with open software and formats, but my Ubuntu laptop can easily read a .docx written by MS Office a Windows 8 machine. I can run many programs and games under WINE. And I can still tweak whatever I like. Meanwhile, people too busy, uninterested, and uneducated to want to change anything can use a simple, elegant, functional platform. As long as our software is continually developed and is supported (which is why UEFI is so scary), I don't see why we should object to black box computers.
fcatalan 14y ago
In fact the GPU on the rPi doesn't even have open source drivers or a public specification, you have to use the provided binary blob if you want all the goodies.
daralthus 14y ago
I see your point with the 3d printing revolution but imho the two most important sentences in the article are: The line between ‘computer’, ‘program’ and ‘media’ blurred to the point where consumers were successfully confused about what it was they were actually buying. ... another where it is successfully co-opted by big money and governments in a concerted effort to give us all a subscription to online Life-As-A-Service where you will be beholden to some party for the ability to gain access to knowledge, information, the right to communicate and so on and where the act of programming will be as tightly regulated as the export of cryptography was. So if you look at it closely: This swing is not only about hardware and software anymore. It is much more about data and the services that it enables. Think of facebook, google etc.

trg2 14y ago

kintamanimatt 14y ago

Those who lived through that period and paid attention are probably well aware of the ridiculous notion that information flows should be controlled in order to protect the children or whatever the fig-leaf of the day is. Ask the Iranian and the Chinese people how they like their firewalls. Let’s make sure it ends up on the side of freedom and democracy, and not on the side of DRM and other forms of control and digital oppression. If my observations are correct then such a swing is about to happen, and this time we had better get it right. The author states the concern and the desirable outcome, but how do we, individually, make sure the pendulum swings in the correct direction?

RobAley 14y ago
The simplest way is through the use of your wallet. Buy "open". E.g. - Need a new desktop? Buy one that doesn't lock down uefi by default, and runs linux compatible hardware - New phone? Buy one with Firefox OS if you can wait that long, or at least go for one with a stock Android install - New book? Buy one from independent publishers/authors who don't support DRM [1] - New app? Don't use a commercial app store, get it direct from the publisher - Music? you get the idea. Voting with your wallet and putting money on the side of open helps keep commercial operators swinging in that direction. As far as government is concerned, I've no idea. [1] Swift plug : http://leanpub.com http://leanpub.com for books, in particular http://leanpub.com/php http://leanpub.com/php .... [edit] In response to the assorted "we're too small a minority" comments below, I would argue that historically with IT that isn't an issue. The internet & web were minority pursuits at one point, commercial walled gardens like AOL were much more common and popular, until the small minority of tech leaders (just like us) forged ahead anyway and showed with our feet how much better it can be. The people reading HN, while comparatively small in number compared to the general population, I think underestimate the power they (and others like them) have to influence the tech lives of their customers, users, friends and family. It doesn't always appear that common sense can beat big money when it comes to affecting the choices made by the general populous, but have some faith in your fellow humanity, these sways are usually only temporary.
- mikecane 14y ago
  >>>New book? Buy one from independent publishers/authors who don't support DRM [1] You must have forgotten the raging battle between Doctorow and the eBookstores. He and his publisher didn't want DRM, but the stores did. This is part of the point the writer is making about the pendulum swinging.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

It's an interesting view of history, but without providing your reasoning for why you think the pendulum is about to swing again I have to assume that it is not.

rolux 14y ago
I agree. While I can follow the author's reasoning about the history of computing (particularly his assertion that computing was most democratic in the 1980s), he doesn't reveal the sources for his optimism, apart from stating: If my observations are correct then such a swing is about to happen, and this time we had better get it right. The interesting part, which is missing, would be a list of such observations.
- mikecane 14y ago
  The iPad being seen as a store for Apple. The Kindles being seen as a store for Amazon. The Nook being seen as a store for Barnes & Noble. Those are just three too damned obvious examples that are totally against the grain of the history of computing he -- and I -- lived through. That's part of the pendulum right there. Also, writers and publishers and musicians not wanting DRM but the stores -- Apple, Amazon, et al -- insisting on it. Another pendulum swing. You wind up not even having total control over your own product. Fake DRM takedowns to stifle competition (see the Vinted thing with Kickstarter). The battle over whether GPS tracking does or doesn't require a court order. All the evidence is out there and I'm surprised any of you need someone else to create such a list. And, shit, I'm a writer and I now want to learn JavaScript because I think something like Open webOS (or the Mozilla OS) is the future we'll all be running towards for technological self-defense and freedom. The path we're currently on is a noose that can hang all of us.
  - a_c_s 14y ago
    But there is no DRM for music in Apple's store (it was dropped entirely in 2009), and Amazon sells DRM free music too.
fauigerzigerk 14y ago

rolux 14y ago

Remember that there are two possible outcomes, one where the internet successfully manages to cause a swing to the edge of freedom, and another where it is successfully co-opted by big money and governments in a concerted effort to give us all a subscription to online Life-As-A-Service where you will be beholden to some party for the ability to gain access to knowledge, information, the right to communicate and so on and where the act of programming will be as tightly regulated as the export of cryptography was. It seems so me that in the 1990s, the future that was widely (outside some truly dystopian sci-fi fringes of the net discourse) regarded as the worst-case scenario was the Internet becoming like radio -- i.e. another peer-to-peer medium turned into a broadcast medium. So it may be worth noting that while the best-case scenario hasn't changed much since then, the worst-case scenario has.

pgeorgi 14y ago
well, sounds about right: Facebook is the radio station, and the users are participating in their call-in show. And for some demographics, the internet isn't much more than Facebook and Wikipedia for their homework (as data source, not to contribute).
justinmk 14y ago
> you will be beholden to some party for [...] the right to communicate This is the most poignant insight in the article. For some decades now, it has been accepted--with minimal opposition--that we are beholden to some party (the state) for the right to travel. Then it is not far-fetched to imagine that in some decades, the right to communicate may be popularly regarded as a mere "privilege" which is granted by the generosity of the state. We accept random searches at airports, centralized driver licensing, red light cameras, etc. The legislature already flirts with the digital equivalents of those concepts.
- gaius 14y ago
  That is why the Founding Fathers were opposed to the idea of a Bill of Rights. Because they knew people would come to believe their rights were granted by the document, instead of merely being non-exhaustively listed in it.

bad_user 14y ago

The most interesting thing about these recent trends is human nature. I remember back in year 2000/2001 how everybody was talking about freedom, open-source and the open nature of the Internet. I remember how the closed garden that Microsoft tried to create was frowned upon. Small companies that were picking the Internet as a delivery platform and using open-source/multi-platform technologies were on the forefront of innovation. Of course regular consumers and businesses never cared, but as Paul Graham once said, if you want to see the future trends in computing, you have to look at what hackers are using today. Then OS X happened, this UNIX-compatible OS that was shiny and cool and all of your UNIX tools were compatible with it and you could run some pretty important proprietary software too, like MS Office or Photoshop. It was more productive for developers than Windows. Compared to Linux it was friendlier to all people. And suddenly Apple was hip again and it slowly captured the hearts of developers. Then the iPhone happened and people didn't mind that it was a closed garden, because there has never been anything like it. Anything that Apple allowed on this new platform, it was taken as a gift, as it was their platform, so if they wanted to ban an app for "duplicating existing functionality" then openness be damned, it was their product after all. Then the stories about lone developers getting rich on the App Store happened, and people didn't mind being at the behest of Apple, as long as they could have some piece of that awesome pie. Of course, countless of reasons were given by tech pundits, trying to rationalize the walled garden they've created - it is better for grandmas that have their PCs ridden with viruses, it is better for the protection of our children, it exposes computing to a wider mass (even though computing in this context means mostly consumption), it solves the problem of app marketing for individual developers without huge marketing budgets, etc... there's always some reason for why Apple was right to act the way it did. Even now that they've released a shitty GMaps replacement, some genuinely believe that they had no choice, when for a company like Apple there are always choices available. Let's not forget for a moment the ultimate argument against this closed garden: if you don't like it, you are free to go somewhere else. And now Apple started suing left and right, which in my opinion is what companies do when finding themselves in the innovator's dilemma, and is doing so while dropping the ball on new versions of its products. They are still successful and they might produce some more golden eggs in the future, but the innovation frenzy of the iPod era is over and they know it. And yet people still cheer for them, even though as far as openness is concerned, Apple makes Microsoft look good. And it was only 12 years ago that people hated Microsoft with a passion for being an obstacle to innovation, even though Microsoft never banned any app from running on Windows or restricted its usage only to certain hardware (but surprise, since Apple has been doing it so successfully, Microsoft is going to start doing it with Windows 8 ... hurray for the renewed and totally not evil Microsoft). I own an Android phone and an iPad. I love my iPad, but it was a gift and I secretly yearn for a Nexus tablet that has the same size + 3G. I also voted with my wallet against apps like Instagram, because I'm primarily an Android user and the aesthetic senses of developers like Marco don't really solve any my problems. I also remember the day I got my Galaxy S, even though I owned an iPhone 3GS ... I got out of my way to buy one out of frustration because Apple was banning apps for blocking calls and SMS messages from specific phone numbers (but hey, look how it "just works"). And I predict similar frustration levels as use-cases for my iPad are unfolding. Already I'm pretty pissed off about my carrier having the ability to enable/disable the tethering option on my iPad. If this is the future of computing, then I shudder to think of the consequences.

snooblywoobly 14y ago

I think the comments on hacker news, in general, need to be a little more tolerant of ambiguity. Just because a statement is not immediately verifiable or is imprecise, it does not mean that it is without worth. The scientific method is a way of verifying our intuition, it is not in and of itself the one true route to all knowledge.

__Joker 14y ago

The freedom we got was a by product or say side effect of computing pheonemenon rather that we actively sought it. I don't think people en masse would like the freedom right now. Most of the people will be happy with the service vs. privacy-freedom compromise we are getting today. I don't want to belabour the point of Google as service and Apple as service.

bloaf 14y ago

a similar thing using hardware had happened in the 80’s with so called ‘dongles’, typically for expensive programs such as CAD software I can think of at least one software package which still uses physical dongles.

ReadEvalPost 14y ago

I know there's a lot of hype around the Raspberry Pi, but it's interesting that you would mention it as a key component of open systems when it's a perfect example of half-closed: * The BCM2835, the microprocessor used on the board, is not available to be purchased by hobbyists * The full data sheet for the BCM2835 is not available without signing an NDA with Broadcom (and presumably that only happens when you have a commercial application) * A schematic is available, but not the PCB layout * The GPU drivers are a binary blob The Beagleboard and the Arduino are much better examples of open hardware.

jacquesm 14y ago
Those are excellent points, when I get home later I'll update the article. That's a big oversight on my part, thank you.

kris_lander 14y ago

Whilst the article mentions how countries like China restrict access to communication networks we should be under no illusions that nearly all major communication networks are ultimately still under the control of central government wherever you live. For the pendulum to permanently swing in favour of "freedom and democracy" we need a genuinely open network. Without an open network open devices, operating systems, software, etc could easily be neutered, if albeit in a rather draconian fashion by hitting the "off" switch. This can seem unlikely in any "free" nation, however this was almost a reality last year during the London riots. As those in power openly lamented the use of Blackberry's BBM network by the rioters (and various other communication networks) it was clear that the government came very close to ordering the service shutdown and I have no doubt it would have been had things deteriorated any further. Perhaps the great next swing might be those attempting to create decentralized mesh networks? One can hope.

nacker 14y ago
I agree 100%! This is the main point that the article misses. Open hardware and open software are completely useless if the networks are not open. The open internet as we know it would never have happened unless it had been provided by thousands of tiny ISPs. The most worrying pendulum swing of all is the consolidation of all traffic into a few giants like Comcast per country. Mesh networking is the next frontier for openness.

jonnathanson 14y ago

The relative ubiquity of the internet is an important consideration here. In previous swings of the pendulum, computing (and/or the internet) was concentrated among a much smaller base of users, many of whom had strongly vested interests in the side to which the pendulum was swinging. These days, the internet is certainly ubiquitous, and "smart" mobile devices are basically ubiquitous, if not yet entirely so. And the vast majority of today's users don't seem to care about privacy, open vs. closed ecosystems, etc. The sheer volume of users who either don't know, or don't care, about these things shifts a LOT of power into the hands of the current power players in the status quo. Hackers and power users are still major forces for change, and always will be. And, in time, they may prevail by offering better solutions to the masses. But the weight of the masses is heavier than it ever has been. I submit that the fulcrum on which the hackers will tilt the masses isn't security, privacy, or anything of that nature. It's openness, and by proxy, IP management. It's the free transmission (or lack thereof) of ideas, information, and content. It's the interoperability (or lack thereof) of all of these things between devices and systems, outside the restrictions or central control of one or two major parties. But the force currently arrayed against the growth of openness is a powerful one. It's convenience. And convenience is, arguably, THE most powerful driver in human psychology. Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, telecoms, and other players in the content space are making plays to become total-solution providers. And the appeal of a one-stop, total solution (the Walmart Effect, if you will) is quite powerful to the masses. To overcome this appeal, the next great disruption will need to equate openness with convenience. Open must = easy. More precisely, open must be more highly correlated with ease than walled gardens are correlated with ease. An historical side note: AOL's monopoly in the ISP game, which lasted for so many years, came about because AOL offered the easiest, most idiot-proof, and most convenient internet experience. It was a walled garden, but beyond the wall, the typical user just saw a massive, untamed jungle full of complex systems, wonky communities, and seemingly insurmountable technical difficulties. AOL fell when people figured out how to make the world outside the wall more ordered, more appealing, and more uniformly approachable. Open standards had a lot to do with this. So did the appearance of portals, which represented a less daunting half-step between the Great Untamed Wild and the AOL garden. And search engines continued this evolution, making the point of entry into most users' internet experience very centralized, orderly, and convenient without walling everything up. Search engines created the subconscious appearance of a walled garden without actually erecting walls.

protomyth 14y ago

I think the article misses one of the fundamental reasons that mobile is a closed environment: fear. It seems we treat things we can put in our pocket as more personal and much different than the twilight zone we expect out of computers. I am sure, at some point, a program uploaded the Outlook address book of some Fortune 500 sales manager to the internet without telling him/her. Any problem or security breach in the PC world is a 1-day story. The same thing happens on a mobile platform (iPhone) and C-level executives are dragged in front of Congress. I gotta tell you, if its a choice between programmer's rights and being dragged in front of Congress because some startup didn't use proper hashing, I would, as a CEO, limit programmers. Pure, simple, and a smart decision for 99.9% of my customers. I will bet if Google has more executives "requested" at Congressional Hearings then side-loading will disappear. The post-PC devices are going to be locked down in the name of security. There is no downside to executives. Some developers will put up with it because of the money just like they did in the pre-iPhone days of mobile deployment. I hate this because I know if I'd been born 20 years later, I would not be a developer. High Schools are not teaching programming anymore and the computers I learned to program on (Atari 400, C64, TI 99/4A) have no modern replacements (sub $200 with development tools included / available cheap). Someone wants to change all this? Then build a modern day Atari 800 / C64. Not OLPC, because you cannot just buy one of those. Something I can hook to the internet and an old TV (since now most families have bought the 2nd generation of HDMI devices). Something that lets me program it.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago
> I think the article misses one of the fundamental reasons that mobile is a closed environment: fear. It seems we treat things we can put in our pocket as more personal and much different than the twilight zone we expect out of computers. Mobile is closed because Apple is closed, were wildly successful when they entered the market, and everyone else followed suit. There success wasn't due to the closed nature, but as is always the case, it became the standard way of doing things.
- adestefan 14y ago
  Mobile is closed because the network providers are terrified of letting devices that they cannot control on their network.

stevewilhelm 14y ago

During the entire period of time the author discusses, most of your critical information has been stored in proprietary, walled gardens: your health records, financial transactions, telephone communication records, etc. If anything, it is getting worse. For example, if one has a cable "triple play" package: all of your web surfing, phone calls & SMS, and television viewing history is recorded and owned by one company. The fact that the edge devices are "open" is moot.

benjamincburns 14y ago

Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club [1] represent! Back in 2006 I started a similar project to TuxPhone that I dubbed OpenCell [2]. I'd been working with GSM modules for a while, and my motivation was "This WinMo phone I have sucks. I sure do hate carrying around a cell phone, MP3 player, and camera all the time - I know I could build one device that'd just do it all." Unfortunately as a student I didn't have the funds to see this to the point of reality, and the iPhone was launched in January 2007, essentially making my effort look like a steaming pile of shit. That said, technology has come a long, long way since then. 3D printing, inexpensive reflow soldering equipment, and stacked DDR packages make this goal pretty attainable compared to when I launched my efforts. I'd love, love, love to see efforts like this revived. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Homebrew_Mobile_Phone_Club [2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20080927003526/http://widgetry.org/dokuwiki/doku.php

rsync 14y ago

Before you worry about the pendulum of mobile app ecosystems, perhaps it's worth stepping back a few layers of abstraction, and look at the pendulum of the physical, human-human interface layer. None of us own our own real property (property tax) - you don't even own your own car (required registration fees even for "planned nonoperation"). You (likely) don't create any of your own food, and are bound by law to carry and present ID. So ... what ? We build our perfect little RMS style open computing world, while we are renters and debtors at the lower layers of our "societal stack".

creat0 14y ago

I fail to see a qualitative difference between "mobile", "laptop", "desktop" or "stovetop". Those are just form factors. They are all computers. We can put a computer inside almost anything nowadays. What matters to me besides what's on the motherboard are peripherals, drivers and access to networks. Things got smaller. We all knew they would. But they should not become less functional. (Hello Apple.)

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genbattle 14y ago

This may just be me picking on one small part of the entire post, but I have a serious technical problem with some of the author's claims, not least of which is his feelings that FPGAs will somehow revolutionize personal computing. Anyone who has programmed with an FPGA will understand the sort of tasks they're best for; hand-optimizing particular algorithms and processes into parallel pipelines and execution units. Running a general-purpose OS on a CPU built in software on top of an FPGA is just not feasible; the yeild of transistors to logic units is very low for FPGAs compared to conventional microprocessors; and there's matters of efficiency, layout, and cost-effectiveness to think of. There has been some success using an FPGA-type programmable gate array in combination with a standard CPU, but the CPU itself is usually a proprietary core made to coordinate and assist the FPGA. These sorts of FPGA co-processors are only ever used for very specialized aplications currently. They won't be replacing general-purpose dedicated CPUs anytime soon (if ever). FPGAs are perfectly suitable for any special-purpose functions they've been programmed for: but I think in terms of desktop and mobile computing, having a farm of parallel execution units in the form of a modern GPU will also yield acceptable results for any parallel consumer applications without the need for as much investment as with dedicated reprogrammable FPGA hardware. The other technical concern I have is mesh networks; we don't currently have the technology to create and maintain large-scale mesh networks, but even if we did, there is a point there the communication required just to maintain the network outpaces the node-to-node bandwidth, or even the global bandwidth available. You also have to deal with privacy concerns around data storage and transmission at nodes while it is en-route to a destination, and circle-of-trust issues, etc. These issues bring the pendulum in a full circle. I agree that the pendulum does seem to be in a state of change at the moment, and all that is keeping it from swinging back (and probably giving it more overall momentum in the progress) is government and business interests. I think the issues we face, and that we have always faced, are not so much technical as they are social and societal. By the time we solve the issues around the commons, ownership, and governance; the technical issues will seem trivial.