Re: that political angle. Excuse my cynicism, but I think a lot of people who kvetch about paying to download stuff from iTunes or paying for software are more exercised by the paying part than the political part. They want stuff for free. Yeah, I like stuff for free, too, but really, don't people deserve to be compensated for their labor? It sucks when record companies get the money instead of musicians, or pig publishers instead of writers, but reducing the payment to 0 isn't going to raise the income of musicians or writers.
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That's true.
Lots of people who complain *do* want stuff for free.
These people are stupid, or they're 14.
As Barney Frank might say, stupid people should be ignored.
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I like iTunes' usability. I like the way iTunes enables the distribution of both high profile and obscure podcast, music, lectures, video, etc. I regularly use iTunes because it safely satisfies two of the key desires of the pirate media market: the creation of mixed and matched singles and smooth, Internet-based digital distribution.
So yes, iTunes is a value-add.
However, FairPlay -- a central iTunes component -- gives Apple the ability to arbitrarily create restrictions limiting the portability of and use to which you can put the media you've purchased.
I understand that this issue -- the issue of digital rights management, DRM -- isn't important to most people. Many issues aren't important to lots of people. A lack of popular attention and mass dismay doesn't rob these issues of importance.
Everything shag and Jordan say is true re: the limitations and failures of open-source and free software and the shattered dreams of better code and the appeals to business to 'try it cause it's always superior' and everything else. It's as hot as a Pussy Cat Doll's crotch over here and I'm not in the mood to argue about software.
Particularly since I'm broadly in agreement with what the other side of the aisle is saying. The point for me is DRM. As I said before, taking its failures into account, I believe that the *simple existence* of open-source platforms helps to keep the closed source world relatively honest.
.d.