World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has fired a thinly-veiled broadside at Apple, insisting that closed app ecosystems and locked down computing environments are stymieing innovation.
In a lengthy interview in The Guardian, Berners-Lee continued his crusade against closed systems, expressing his disappointment that the era Steve Jobs described as 'Post-PC' has shut down space for innovation.
He also referenced the oft-called 'walled gardens' that prevents users from making completely free and unbiased choices in the software that they use.
Choices
"I should be able to pick which applications I use for managing my life," said Berners-Lee. "I should be able to pick which content I look at, and I should be able to pick which device I use, which company I use for supplying my internet, and I'd like those to be independent choices."
Berners-Lee believes that tablets and phones are not providing the experimentation space or choice that they should, adding: "One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it.
"That's kind of important to me, and that's also kind of important to the whole future of the internet … obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation."
The popularity of Raspberry Pi – a British attempt to provide the next generation with a computer that is completely open for alteration and experimentation – suggests that the will is still there for such a system.
And it's clear that the man who created the internet's most famous element is not convinced that we should be providing the bricks and mortar for our own walled gardens.
Via The Guardian
