The technology blogosphere is going crazy over the fact that the Google Voice app was rejected by Apple's App Store. This supposedly proves the closedness of the iPhone. Yeah, okay, it sucks that the iPhone is not an open platform. But please, why all the surprise and hullabaloo? 
I mean, it's not exactly like Apple have kept this as a big secret or something. I'm sure even technology industry bloggers must have been aware of the iPhone's non-openness before now. I mean, they took "Baby Shaker" off the App Store, and as a non-US-ian, that's far more useful to me than Google Voice.
I have an iPod touch and I love it in spite of it being a closed platform. I bought it under no illusions that it would be an open platform. But it's still useful and fun. I've got a Palm TX as well, and that's closed in a different way (namely, that you need to be Sherlock Holmes in order to sniff out the documentation and compiler in order to build any software). I bought the iPod touch as a replacement for my existing iPod, but I didn't fool myself into thinking it was anything other than a closed platform. My toasted sandwich maker, microwave, dishwasher, lawnmower and satellite television reception box are also closed platforms.
My mobile phone is technically a more open platform since I can (and have) written J2ME applications and installed them without any vendor permission, special toolkits or unlock codes - just a copy of Eclipse with the relevant plugins installed, and an HTTP server to host the JAD and JAR files on. Of course, if the iPhone kids desperately want an open platform, they can always get themselves a shitty old Sony-Ericsson or Nokia GSM handset for about a fifth of the price of the iPhone and start writing J2ME apps.
Of course, none of this is really Apple's fault. It's the whole industry's fault. The mobile industry is plagued with closedness, daddy-knows-best and all the other shit you'd expect. We only haven't noticed it because our phones have been too shitty for it to be a problem. Imagine what life would be like if every advancement in desktop and laptop computing (including hardware, software and networking) had to be approved by a oligopoly of phone companies. No, you can't install that new graphics card because BT say no. Linux? No, hasn't got approval by Verizon.
Yes, it would suck. Under such a scenario, if an IT vendor collaborated with one of the phone companies to produce something better, would that be a reason to throw a big hissy fit? Of course not. The mobile market is closed by design. It's going to be a fuckload of effort making it not suck.
If anything, this should prompt advocates of openness to build an open source iPhone killer. All the components are here for it to happen - there's plenty of free software that one could stitch together: OS kernels, compilers, programming languages, interpreters, browsers (the WebKit engine used by Safari and Chrome, the Gecko engine used by Firefox) and so on. There's even people installing Ubuntu on Sony-Ericsson P990i's.
More than anything, what's needed is not just an open phone platform, but a hackable-in-use phone. That means bash, Python and/or Ruby. irb would work pretty nice on a phone. You'd have to add a tab button first, but so would a Python interactive shell. Hackability is what drives openness: what makes Linux useful is the fact that a few million people have hacked around with it to do interesting things. Come up with a good API to access the phone's functionality and let people have fun. What cooler an introduction to programming could there be than firing up an irb shell on one's phone and typing something like:
AddressBook.contacts.collect {|i| i if i.categories.member? :geeks }.each {|contact| contact.send_text "What time is it? NERD TIME!" }
And don’t tell me that the phones aren’t powerful enough for it. The iPhone 3GS is not much less powerful than my old PC, which is doing sterling work as a Linux server for a fair few things. I’m sure one could cobble together a smartphone device that could run the JavaSE runtime, glibc and a few languages sitting atop either. What would be really nice is if the Android dev phone was made available - the whole point of Android seems to be rather destroyed if it’s locked up and tied into a particular operator.
But instead of exploring the open alternatives, the newfound advocates of openness will bitch about how a well-known closed platform that any sane person knows is, and likely to remain, closed is, err, closed. (Of course, the best way of opening up the iPhone is to prove the model - show the benefits of an open phone platform.)
How not to do anything about it? Just bitch on blogs about how closed the iPhone is. The whole thing proves how it truly is the smartest of the smart who are employed in the writing-stuff-about-tech game. The rest of the world is really missing out on their cutting insight and raw intelligence.
