Homebrew Apple Club

Let's take a mental meandering back to the beginning of Apple in the mid '70s. The original Apple computers where hobby, for-fun machines. Heck the schematics for the Apple I were passed around at the early meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club and Wozniak himself (co-founder of Apple) would go to people's houses and help them build their own. Freely exchanging, modifying, and giving software and hardware designs back to the community was the norm.

Fast forward into the early 80's and you see a shift in that open culture. Most companies adopted copyright and restrictive licenses to limit or prohibit copying or redistribution. Richard Stallman had been modified the software for printers to work well at MIT before Xerox showed up with one of the first laser printers. He was quite frustrated when Xerox would not give him access to the source code so he could utilize the improvements he had used on the previous printers. For the first time we began to see centralized control of the functionality of the hardware we purchase.

Stallman went on to found the Free Software Foundation, and write the General Public License upon which Linux is based.

Free software is simply software that respects our freedom — our freedom to learn and understand the software we are using. Free software is designed to free the user from restrictions put in place by proprietary software, and so using free software lets you join a global community of people who are making the political and ethical assertion of our rights to learn and to share what we learn with others. - Working Together for Free Software

Not being able to share software shortly extended to not being able to share music, and then electronic books. Much of this being controlled by Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) software which limits how you can read, view, or listen to books, video, and music. Of course Apple is on the forefront of this.

Apple's iPod/iPhone/iPad software, now called iOS, is designed not only to control and restrict the books, music, and content you can listen too but also the applications. They would like to keep track of every piece of software you have and make sure you can only buy it from them. We've gone from sharing everything that can run on a computer with each other to requiring that you have a credit card and billing address tied to an iTunes account so that we can run even free applications!

The limitations that Apple puts on what we can run on the hardware we own are arbitrary and we are not bound by them. Essentially they would prefer us to sit inside a jail they control. It's a silly prison that it's very legal to just break out of. To break out of this jail, you just have to open the door. However they keep making the door harder and harder to open. The software they would prefer you run on your iPhone is one they completely control.

This is a big jump over the past 30 years from helping people build the hardware from scratch in their homes. Apple, I'm disappointed. You are becoming the dispensary of Information Purification Directives in your walled garden of iOS.
Why do I feel like I'm staring at a big iPad in the 1984 commercial?

Text of "1984" Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

We shall prevail indeed...