Good Open, Bad Open

2010.10.18   prev     next

Closed: The typical videogame console. Big startup costs, and even if average Joe was willing to pay, he might still be turned down when he applied to obtain the SDK.

Good Open: The iPhone and iPad. Low entry costs, and no special vetting process required to get up and running with the SDK. Easy-to-pass examination of finished apps to screen out the buggy, the malicious, and in general anything that might cause trouble or confusion for users. Sufficient control of how apps are installed to discourage most users from casual piracy.

Bad Open: The typical Android phone. Do whatever you want. Casual piracy is a piece of cake. Malware is a significant issue.

Until the advent of Apple’s App Store a few years ago, Good Open didn’t really exist. There was Closed. And there was Bad Open, which was thought of as just “open.” And so millions of developers got used to thinking in the simple terms of closed (bad; wrong) vs open (good; if somewhat problematic). And so when Apple’s App Store came out, many developers interpreted it as just another form of “closed.” But it isn’t. It’s Good Open.

Developers, try to think of it this way: The iPhone and iPad are wide open for you to develop great apps, and then sell them and maybe make some decent money doing it. Instead of excoriating it as “closed,” why not embrace it? Haven’t you always wanted to write some popular apps, anyway? Piracy and viruses were fun, but now you have a chance to do something worthwhile.

When Google insists that “open will win,” they’re actually right — but it’s Good Open that will win, not Bad Open. When Google says that “open always wins,” they’re right again — but why does open always win? Because it permits piracy? No. Because it allows malware? No. Because it permits lots of ordinary developers to write apps? Yes! And if it could somehow guarantee those developers that most users will either pay or not use the app? Even better.

Good Open merges the best qualities of Closed and Bad Open, and in the process actually improves those qualities to something substantially better than they ever were before.

Update 2010.10.19 — Android creator Andy Rubin responds to Steve Jobs’s recent comments about Android and “open:”

Translation to a human language: “An OS is a cool toy for us ubergeeks to screw around with. Non-programmer computer users don’t understand that. But they don’t understand much.”