The BBC reports on Jonathan Zittrain's comments, with frequent misuse of the word 'hacker'. The report describes Zittrain as thinking that the very openness of the Internet is leading more and more people to switch to locked platforms like the iPhone, comparing this risk-free 'sterile' environment with a chaotic world of phishing, botnets, distributed denial of service attacks and illegal file sharing networks.
But I just don't buy Zittrain's argument. He sees the Internet as having only two sides - basically, insecure Windows installs or the iPhone. Experience shows otherwise: Linux, the BSD systems (including OS X and Darwin), Java, Apache, and open source. The very existence of these systems knocks a fatal blow in Zittrain's argument. Windows is an anomaly that distorts the argument. And, to be honest, who even uses Windows anymore? Most of the people I know only have a Windows install so they can see how badly IE 6 renders their standards-compliant (X)HTML and CSS or play DirectX games. Even my parents don't use Windows anymore. I remember back in 1997 when I first discovered FreeBSD, the idea that my parents would be using a computer running an OS I could ssh into was completely alien.
And the iPhone is an anomaly of an equal scale. I have a mobile phone in my pocket that is smaller than an iPhone, about as sexy, and for which I can write my own applications for (even if it requires me to use painfully bloated Java toolkits) - a privilege that I have exercised. The iPhone distorts this too. Most phones will not be getting significantly more closed. And Android, OpenMoko and the array of Linux phones seem to be pointing in the opposite direction. The fact that six million people downloaded Firefox 3 yesterday seems to suggest that people are perfectly at home with open platforms.
