The thing that has always surprised me about Apple's recent success is that they seem to have found a way to convince developers that open doesn't matter as much as it used to.<p>For years and years, geeks complained about Microsoft being "closed". There were near constant rants against proprietary software, and Microsoft was the most evil amongst other evil companies.<p>Apple, is and for as long as I can remember been consistently more "closed" than Microsoft, but since OSX was released, rage against "closed" has all but died. Now, people like the iPhone and OSX so much that when the subject of closed vs open systems come up in relation to software these days, people shuffle around nervously, shrug and then start talking excitedly about how beautiful Apple's products are, and how revolutionary they continue to be.<p>I certainly understand why developers are so enthusiastic about a great GUI on top of a *nix. I certainly understand that the iPhone and iPod were revolutionary products. I'm sure the iPad will be stunning. I just find it incredibly ironic that as Microsoft and other "closed" companies are opening up and releaseing a lot more software under open licenses, Apple continues to tighten and tighten control over it's products, platforms and services.<p>Full disclosure, I use I Win 7 + OSS for my apps, and I've tried to like apple for years, I just have emotional issues vs them. :) I'm obviously biased, but I hope I didn't flame here. I'd love to have a calm, reasoned, discussion about this.<p>Does closed vs open matter any more?<p>Thoughts?
I think Apple gets some benefit of the doubt because of how they've gone back and forth, and produced enough cool things that they get some geek cred.<p>The mystique of the Woz days, getting full specs for an Apple I along with the machine, etc., probably has considerable lingering impact on techies considering Apple a fellow techie company, as opposed to an Evil Corporate Behemoth.<p>Subsequent Apple II and pre-OSX Mac stuff was pretty closed, but at least balanced that a bit with relatively vibrant 3rd-party software development, so lots of us have good memories of educational games we played on an Apple II or Mac in school, while the PC was just for Lotus or whatever.<p>And OSX of course is quite open for a mainstream desktop OS. The sub-GUI part of the base OS is open as Darwin, and even the closed-source full thing is relatively tinkerable--- comes with gcc/python, allows for things like DarwinPorts to be built on top of it, etc.
I'd say it does matter quite a lot, which is why I use Fedora on my computer and Android on my phone. OS X itself is even rather open by comparison to the iPhone OS platform, which illustrates rather nicely that Apple tends to favor openness when they're the underdog and closed platforms when they're in the lead.
Like most things Apple it comes down to good marketing.<p>Even though almost all their end products are closed-source and some are even in a closed ecosystem, there tool-chain for building these products is almost all open source and based on standards. In general they greatly contribute to the open source projects they use. This probably allows most people to rationalize championing both openness and Apple at the same time.<p>So while I don't own any Apple products, I do appreciate the projects they have contributed to.
Separate from the whole open vs. closed debate is the matter of usability and design.<p>Simply stated, Apple products are the best at this for most products. Developers are driven to the quality of the environment and the subsequent quality of the products that they'll be making.<p>I work mostly in the enterprises realm where it's easy to see that the baseline "quality" of the ecosystem (mostly Microsoft, but also other related stuff) affects the quality of the the products built around it.<p>A quick glance at the products built around the Apple ecosystem shows a stark difference. Ever since I started bringing my Mac to work (since the switch to the Intel processor), the difference has been even more obvious to me.<p>I think that in this instance, open vs. closed is a means to an end. If people never had any problems with how Microsoft stuff worked, then no one would have been griping about their stuff being closed. And since Apple stuff is generally pretty good, people are willing to forgo the "closed" ecosystem since they are getting what they need out of it.<p>I also think that the closed nature of Apple's ecosystem is a little overstated. For instance: it's true that the iPhone app store has pretty draconian policies, but on the other hand, nobody has to truly go through it to get an app onto the iPhone. They could just make a web app. However, people choose to create native iPhone apps because they work better. But then again, they probably work better because Apple tends to enforce their strict policies.