> The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed.
Yes, but 15 years ago far fewer people did far less with computing devices of any kind than they do today. Imagine if, for example, I made this argument:
"In 1992, the default for using a personal computer was to both create and consume information, e.g. writing and reading email, writing and reading documents. Today the default is to just consume information, e.g. YouTube, TikTok, AppleTV."
That would be true, but not because of locking devices down. It would be true in because in the last thirty years, the industry had expanded the number of users and their use cases by orders of magnitude.
The people who sent and received emails are still sending and receiving emails. Same for the people writing and reading documents. But all those people are also now watching TV and YouTube and TikTok on computers instead of analogue televisions in their recreational time AROUND the documents and emails.
And there are many, many people who just want to consume content for every "maker" generating content of any type, whether it be programs, documents, videos, music, whatever.
How many people are involved in the construction and operation of the Webb telescope? How many people just want to see pictures of what it sees?
Makers are a small proportion of humanity, and even for makers, making is a small proportion of our use cases for tech.
The next thing then becomes, "Why can't we use GP computers for consuming all this content?"
And the tongue-in-cheek answer is, "Because Linux." Optimizing a device for makers often makes it sub-optimal for consumers.
I am a bassist. But I listen to music far more than I play music, and I have no interest in constructing a player-bass like a player-piano. For when I listen to music, closed-source "information appliance" ecosystems beat open-source general-purpose ecosystems.
I maintain quite a bit of general-purpose computing ways to manage music, but honestly, it's more because I have an aversion to corporate control than any thought that it's easier to be in complete control.
Joel Spolsky wrote that the key feature of Napster wasn't that music was free, it was that you could type the name of a song and listen to it right away. The challenge for us as technologists pursuing a free future is that information appliances do this better than general-purpose ecosystems.
The challenge that you describe is primarily political, not technological. It wouldn't matter one bit if Linux became the perfectly polished consumer OS today if its users are still locked out of DRM'd video services by their owners, for example.
> Joel Spolsky wrote that the key feature of Napster wasn't that music was free, it was that you could type the name of a song and listen to it right away.
If that paraphrase is true then Joel Spolsky has no idea what he's talking about on this subject.
Without a doubt the key feature of Napster was that students could download-- not stream-- music. For free. Students would consequently fill their harddrives with everything they thought they'd want to listen to in their lifetime, often buying 2nd harddrives to populate with more mp3s. (Well, that and pron.) Keep in mind many dorms were still using dialup connections during this period-- thus there was a pattern of students running to the library computer lab to download a few mp3 albums to zip disk (yes, zip disks) then bring them back to the dorms.
What facilitated immediate listening/viewing was sharing directories in Windows with the rest of the LAN on college campuses.
Quick digression to argue against the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect-- while your paraphrase of Joel Spolsky expresses an idea that is indeed false, I reserve judgement on anything else Spolsky has ever written (and frankly on whatever his verbatim words were on this same topic). I mean what kind of pathetic, impulsive nimrod would I become if I simply through out an entire body of someone's work on a single passing impression?
Edit: Just to cover my bases-- in every case I can remember, students who were playing music in their dorms or a shared space had winamp or some other such player loaded up with a playlist selected from thousands from their own collection. Napster was the place to download songs for your collection, not the place to build an ad-hoc playlist in realtime. Maybe there are cases where people were doing this. But the overwhelming supermajority of Napster users were using it because they could replicate a subset of the whole to build their own lifetime library of music. For free.
2nd edit: I almost forgot-- nearly everyone in the dorms would share a directory when they hooked up to the LAN. The process of finding immediately playable content was to browse the various shared directories in windows, or use Windows search on them which IIRC worked incredibly slow or not at all. This was a common practice because again, most people were still on dial-up and couldn't download anything from Napster nearly as fast as you could on the computer lab networks.
Later, Youtube made both music and video files immediately playable. Around that same time, torrent tech started to improve to the point where you could stream while downloading as well as do keyword searches with vastly improved results. This is all to say that Napster kicked off a pattern of college kids grabbing free content, and this proliferation of content caused the development of realtime playback of discoverable content.
So what you paraphrased above isn't exactly "wet streets caused rain." It's more like "the issue isn't the rain-- it's the wet streets." I'm honestly not sure which is worse. :)
Yes, but 15 years ago far fewer people did far less with computing devices of any kind than they do today. Imagine if, for example, I made this argument:
"In 1992, the default for using a personal computer was to both create and consume information, e.g. writing and reading email, writing and reading documents. Today the default is to just consume information, e.g. YouTube, TikTok, AppleTV."
That would be true, but not because of locking devices down. It would be true in because in the last thirty years, the industry had expanded the number of users and their use cases by orders of magnitude.
The people who sent and received emails are still sending and receiving emails. Same for the people writing and reading documents. But all those people are also now watching TV and YouTube and TikTok on computers instead of analogue televisions in their recreational time AROUND the documents and emails.
And there are many, many people who just want to consume content for every "maker" generating content of any type, whether it be programs, documents, videos, music, whatever.
How many people are involved in the construction and operation of the Webb telescope? How many people just want to see pictures of what it sees?
Makers are a small proportion of humanity, and even for makers, making is a small proportion of our use cases for tech.