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Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a very good and often quoted paper and in the mean time book to explanation why open source works so well. Besides the good content, it is a metaphor that I like a lot.

Apple’s AppStore seems to work well currently (100m downloads in the first 60 days), but continues to receive criticism for the unpredictable banns for applications (Podcaster and also recently Mailwranlger). Apple takes the freedom to control the content and to remove applications that do not meet the requirements or that they simply do not like in THEIR STORE. Some “contributors” are seriously upset about the devaluation of their sometimes very hard work to provide a piece of software that can only be distributed through a single channel - the AppStore.

Google is yet to prove to be different, but I have good hopes for their “store”, which they call “market”. This sounds much better to me wrt to the expectation I would have for a place to distribute my software through. On the android blog it is announced as

an open content distribution system that will help end users find, purchase, download and install various types of content on their Android-powered devices. The concept is simple: leverage Google’s expertise in infrastructure, search and relevance to connect users with content created by developers like you.

With the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2.0 software for the first iPhone generation and the iPod touch Apple also introduced Microsoft Exchange support.

For a client like Outlook, but also e.g. for my Nokia E61, Zimbra Server will look like and behave lika an Exchange. That means you can simply point Mobile.me (me.com) or your iPhone/iPod at your Zimbra mail server and done. You get mail, calendar and contacts push over the air. Note: Make sure you diable your IMAP account for the same server should you have one, otherwise you might confuse yourself…

Reading John’s post on open source, Mac OS and Freedom 0, I reflected a little my first 3 months of using a Mac for some of my work (I was not as fortunate as John, so I have to use the one at home).

I agree that most of the people you meet at camps and conferences (at least the one John and the like get to go to) have at some point or the other worked with most of the available environments and figured that a combination of OSes including OS X on a Macbook Pro is the most productive combination in a very sleek form factor with an acceptable level of evilness.

The thing that does make me think with OS X is actually not the mentioned closed SW and iTunes DRM issues you might consider that no freedom or even evil, but I don’t. I want to make sure I can buy what I want to buy (if you do not have an American credit card you have to steal your favorite soap as you can not buy it in other iTunes stores but the US one) and that I can use what I’ve payed for (where is the point to paying for Music if I then have to break the law - remove DRM - or steal it again to be able to play it in my car?) As long as the offer matches the requirement at a reasonable price point, I’m well willing to accept certain limitations, especially if the are market or even economy driven and not just made up by a monopolist for his own interest.

For me it would be the 100 missing features issue you can only partly solve through the great repository of open source or not always open source but mostly free solutions. The obviously more tricky ones leave room for just one too many 39$ smart but closed tool purchases (UI configurable firewall, use a scanner, place an .htaccess file on an FTP server,…) if do not want to solve them on a command line and do not want to switch OSes all the time for the smallest feature.

But looking at it from another angle and comparing to the Windows world, I can quickly conclude, that the combination of engaging experience and open standards foundation of the Mac platform allows for smart people to make a living by doing what they like (coding and solving problems). The fact that the tools are not available as open source is only due to the fact that the open source business models will not work for software for 20$ to 40$ that will never ever need support. So I will continue happily to load my credit card bill with small $ items for add-ons to my work environment. If Apple will manage to integrate the right ones over time into their platform without putting the developers out of business, then even better.