With computers, however, a simple change of code can deny you any use of the machine or even access to what you created on it in the past. Many applications do not allow you to access any data file, even though that you created, if your license expires. And it is quite feasible that they can lock your machine altogether with one of those constant "updates" if they decide that you need to buy a different one or that the content stored on it is "inappropriate" in their opinion.
So it matters quite a bit who controls the code running on the machine, even though all what most people do with that code is limited to mundane tasks.
............
Agreed.
Open Source has changed the computing landscape. Some changes are visible: our discussion of the highly visible Ubuntu project is an example.
Other changes -- perhaps the most significant changes -- are not so easy to spot.
As Wojtek wrote, and as I described in the ancient post, "Windows Vista as Neoliberal Instrument" (see link below), the trouble with closed source isn't that it costs money or that Redmond or Cupertino are 'bad' or any of that.
Windows Vista as Neoliberal Instrument:
<http://monroelab.net/blog/?p=611>
The trouble is that closed platforms can, with or without notice, become ever more restrictive, limiting the freedom of movement of both geek hobbyists and non-geek users.
Apple's FairPlay DRM infrastructure (DRM = Digital Rights Management) works well because it's carefully designed to create the appearance of a wide range of freedom within a tightly enclosed operational space.
FairPlay --
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay>
Users can easily move media from iTunes to iPhone to iPod and so on within Apple's schema -- also, non-FairPlay'ed media, such as MP3s, is openly welcomed into the Apple machine ecology. This obscures the inherent restrictiveness of Cupertino's DRM.
Microsoft's much clumsier efforts -- which included DRM'ing media purchased for its Zune device, then inexplicably retiring authentication servers, thereby orphaning users' music -- are easily detected and ridiculed.
The difference is smoothness of execution, not intent or emergent implications.
At the top of this post I stated that Open Source had changed computing.
Perhaps what I should have written is that Open Source has changed the *politics* of computing. In a way not entirely unlike the Cold War era's global public relations struggle between the USSR and the US (during which, American elites felt pressure to concede somewhat to the demands of vocal minorities) the *simple existence* of highly functional Open Source software -- the "threat of a good example" -- has pushed Redmond and Cupertino towards technical improvements and, I argue, helped keep closed systems from becoming as closed as their owners might like.
See, the old, but still instructive Halloween docs for more info --
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Halloween_documents_leak>
Turning to Apple, everyone's beloved OS X is based on Freebsd Darwin, a pillar of Open Source computing.
OS X's Freebsd Darwin pedigree:
<http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html>
So even Apple users, who often seem to believe that the Open Source vs. closed source debate has nothing to do with them, have directly benefited from the work of countless Open Source developers.
.d.