Linus Torvalds: Locked Down Technologies Lose in the End

http://mashable.com/2011/11/18/linus-torvalds-apple-lockdown/

by RyanMcGreal • 15 years ago

97 52 15 years ago

noahlt• 15 years ago

That's easy for him to say, but is there any evidence that this is, in fact, true?

dredmorbius2• 15 years ago

Some. Interesting paper from some years ago on trends and missed opportunities in the computer industry. Unfortunately, it leaves off just where things get interesting: http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/wpawuwpio/9406003.htm

The general trend is that the more general, more flexible, lower-cost, more modular solution tends to win out in the long run. That's been different solutions at different times, but "more open" is a good general rule.

tjogin2• 15 years ago

Whether locked down technologies "tend" to lose depends on what categories of technologies you count.

A common mistake when speaking of closed vs. open systems is to look at a very narrow set of technologies and product categories, often limited to PCs, and extrapolate from that to other kinds of technologies, like smart phones. But the world of technology is bigger than that, much bigger.

You've got everything from enterprise solutions, to consumer electronics, to embedded technologies. People want "open" and "freedom" in general purpose computing solutions, but people (regular people) tend to not even reflect on that in consumer electronics, like gaming consoles, GPS-devices, or the software in their cars. And, the last few years, many classes of computers are becoming more and more like consumer electronics devices, and less like PCs.

Suffice to say, there are quite a few markets and product categories that are traditionally completely "locked down" or "closed" or "integrated", or whatever you want to call them, that absolutely do not "tend to lose in the end".

jeffdavis3• 15 years ago

I'll add to that the amount of software we use that's not even really on our computers at all, but on a server somewhere else.

dman• 15 years ago

The parts of the market that have high barriers to entry benefit lesser from openness because its hard for an open alternative to bootstrap itself. The barriers to entry can be regulation (medical devices, hospital IT systems), cartels (music industry), financial (cost of developing custom hardware).

shadowfox• 15 years ago

It seems to me that people also tend to severely underestimate the amount of embedded systems in their life. The tech savvy sometimes think about systems in their car or their office elevator. Most people dont know and dont care. And we arent even talking about the electronics/software that runs the fancy coffee machine or that thermostat.

As a tinkerer I had like to have (secure) access to some of these things. But as you said most people don't really care. And manufacturers have little incentive to open it up.

tankenmate2• 15 years ago

Umm but Linux probably has the largest OS share of embedded devices; smart phones (Android), ADSL / cable routers, et cetera.

scrrr• 15 years ago

> Suffice to say, there are quite a few markets and product categories that are traditionally completely "locked down" or "closed" or "integrated", or whatever you want to call them, that absolutely do not "tend to lose in the end".

Hm, that could very well be. Could you give an example or two?

For example a GPS device in the car may be proprietary as you said, but a car itself isn't. Not sure about particular patents and rules, but can't anyone with enough investment start making cars? Gaming also isn't restricted to game consoles either. Or maybe I'm just thinking about different categories.

Even stories that are in the public domain are probably better known to most people because there were more movies made about them and more references were made in culture.

Openness allows things to become ubiquitous, but yeah, it's probably a difference if you talk about phone operating systems or cooking recipes. But still.. What Linus says rings true to me.

tjogin2• 15 years ago

Game consoles, cars and GPS-devices are closed in the same sense that Macs, iPhones and iPads are. The vendor supplies the product as a complete integrated experience, not as hardware that you install whichever software you want on.

Bdennyw• 15 years ago

Linux on the desktop is a fantastic counter example.

RyanMcGreal2• 15 years ago

It may be that MS-DOS/Windows has been "open enough" to capture and hold overwhelming market share. MS-DOS became the default PC OS in the 1980s due to Microsoft's cheap, non-exclusive licencing model, and Windows started out as a GUI layer on top of DOS.

In addition, third party developers have always enjoyed free, open access to the same set of system APIs as Microsoft itself, so it has been an easy platform to develop for. That, in turn, has strengthened the positive network externality that keeps Windows dominant.

sp3322• 15 years ago

You're cherry-picking an example. Linux in general is a counter-counter example. In addition to running a large proportion of webservers (actually the open-source Apache server hosts over 50% of all websites), Linux also runs on the majority of smartphones sold.

warmfuzzykitten• 15 years ago

Seems like you're equally guilty of cherry-picking examples. Nothing you said is a counter-example to Linux on the desktop, which has less market share than two "locked in" OSs.

Overall, Linux has lower OS market share than five other operating systems, all of which are either from Microsoft or Apple. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

jeffdavis3• 15 years ago

Another way of looking at it though is that businesses choose open technology platforms, but consumers choose integrated/closed end products.

I'd like to believe that consumers will, in the end, choose open technology (directly or indirectly). Maybe it has something to do with the rate of technological change, and it's just a matter of time before the benefits of open technology are demanded. But the evidence is not conclusive.

If anything tips the scales, it will be when consumers start to figure out that they don't own their devices or the content on them. People are getting a vague sense of that with locked-down mp3 players that make it hard to copy songs around. It will be a bigger deal when the person that gives all their books away because now they have electronic ones becomes furious when they find out they are forever beholden to amazon (and its book-deleting whims) to be able to read them.

rimantas• 15 years ago

And Apple keeps collecting >50% of profits with ~5% iPhone market share.

bryanlarsen• 15 years ago

Neither Windows nor OS X are (currently) locked down.

tikhonj3• 15 years ago

The main reason Linux is not prevalent on the desktop has nothing to do with openness--it is just basically impossible to buy a new computer with Linux.

The reason it is impossible to buy a computer with Linux is largely Mircorosfts wildly anti-competitive behavior in the past. Note how much work and marketing it took Apple to carve out a non-trivial market share--there are no companies pushing Linux adoption nearly as heavily.

There are too many confounding factors affecting Linux on the desktop to use it to judge open technology in general.

kristiandupont• 15 years ago

That may be true but the assertion was that open systems tend to win. If you add the premise "except when there are external factors", there is really no argument left.

rajpaul2• 15 years ago

Take what Linus says about locked down technologies losing in the long term and consider that technology is often a "winner takes all" game and we have an interesting scenario playing out for iOS in the future.

protomyth3• 15 years ago

Technology is not often a "winner take all" game. The PC industry is the anomaly. Which other technology industries have one winner? Sure isn't cellphones or TVs.

jiggy20112• 15 years ago

In terms of interchangeable commodities there is space for many players. But in terms of more fundamental standards such as Windows vs Mac , JS vs Flash , VHS vs Betamax there tends to be one strongly dominant winner. The Mac only became really popular once it basically became a PC with a different GUI. In terms of cellphones pre smart-phone most were basically interchangeable since they were all capable of making voice calls and SMS over GSM , there was limited interest in developing applications for them by 3rd parties.

The disadvantage that iOS has in terms of becoming dominant is that only apple at present makes hardware which can run it (officially anyway) so it is in Apple's interest to keep the hardware cost relatively high since they make allot of money from selling it.

Once the it gets to the point where everybody wants a smartphone and tablet computer there will be allot of pressure for low cost products which Apple has no interest in providing. Android & similar can win bigger here because google does not make money from the hardware. They make money from the advertising etc so they are mostly interested in making sure that there are as many low cost products as possible that can run their software.

rajpaul2• 15 years ago

Cellphones and TVs prove that it's "winner takes all", because they all use standards that have won and now have it all. For example, despite the fact that Blu-ray players are made by different manufactures, the Blu-ray technology is still the take all winner in the HD format wars.

Also, throwing the PC industry out as an anomaly is a mistake because iOS and the PC both particular kinds of technology - they are platforms. In this type of "winner takes all" scenario it isn't the standard that takes it all, but the platform providers. The only hope for iOS is the web as the platform.

Aside, I think that Windows Mobile has an even more compelling business model than Android, because Microsoft has more of a financial incentive to improve their proprietary platform than Google does.

dredmorbius2• 15 years ago

Um, the evidence is pretty strongly against you. Especially at moderate stages of adoption.

There's typically a greenfields period in which many competing firms emerge, followed by a rapid consolidation usually driven by economies of scale, which is a fancy way of saying that the market is too small for more than one or a handful (monopoly/oligopoly) number of firms to compete.

This is often driven by network effects covering physical infrastructure (delivery or transmission networks), sales networks, interconnects, research, patent portfolio scaling, etc.

Examples of technology sectors dominated by single / few firms include telecommunications, power and gas utilities, mainframe hardware/software/services, personal computing operating system + productivity suites, Internet backplane, Internet last mile, cellular service, microprocessors (Intel, AMD, ARM), photocopying (through the 1990s at least), consumer electronics manufacture (Foxconn) and pharmaceuticals, just off the top of my head.

You could add related sectors such as Big Box retail (Walmart, Target), retail pharmacy (CVS, Walgreens, Rite-Aid), online retail (Amazon), online auctions (eBay), online classifieds (Craigslist), for largely similar reasons.

blinkingled2• 15 years ago

A better way to put it would be to say "Locked down technologies tend to not become as ubiquitous as their open counterparts".

Linux is a good example - other proprietary UNIX systems are not everywhere as Linux is (openness being relative). Windows is another - it was more open than OS X. Both proprietary UNIX systems and OS X lost in terms of market share.

Another example is Sony's proprietary formats - Memory Stick Duo Pro or whatever it was called.

So there is a definite history of markets preferring open alternatives when they were practical and at least in the same ballpark of usability of the closed/proprietary counterparts.

Also the context is important as the article points out -

.. in Brazil, where Apple iPhone users cannot buy games for the device, due to specific legal requirements from the Brazilian government. Apple has reacted by simply removing the games category for users in Brazil altogether. Because of its secretive corporate culture, Apple has recently been criticized in Brazil for being the “most closed company in the world.”

archangel_one2• 15 years ago

I don't think it makes sense to compare Windows and OSX and say that OSX lost because it was less open. By the time OSX came around Windows had been a monopoly for some time. OSX hasn't gotten any more open over time (probably less so, in fact) but its market share has gone up and Apple is now worth more as a company than Microsoft - so who's lost there?

protomyth3• 15 years ago

I really doesn't make sense to compare OS X versus Windows given the history of both parts of OS X (OpenStep and Mac OS). Mac OS was available on clones and didn't expand the market at all. OpenStep was available on multiple platforms from multiple vendors. Neither gained market share. To be fair about it, 1984 was a little too late in the game as the C64 was losing share, Apple was already pretty low (both II and Mac), and Microsoft already had a hefty advantage [1].

[1] http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/5

astine• 15 years ago

I'm fairly certain the grandparent meant MacOS for which the explanation would make sense. Dos and Windows were more widely available and could run more software because of Microsoft's comparatively open business model.

blinkingled2• 15 years ago

We are talking ubiquity here. And relative openness. Windows 7/Vista/XP are ubiquitous OSes that are more open (put it on any piece of hardware you want as long as it is x86{_64} etc.). Mac OS and OS X were open - but locked down to hardware. Both Mac OS and OS X were and are less ubiquitous (i.e. 5% market share vs. 95% for Windows for a long time now) than any version of Windows. Apple making more money or Steve Ballmer's whims are not the contentions here - ubiquity of products is.

dubya• 15 years ago

I don't understand the Brazil part. It sounds like Apple just didn't want to go through the certification process for every iOS game. Do Android games somehow avoid the process? Or do only paid games have to be certified?

glassx• 15 years ago

In an article [1] from a brazilian website, the "classification director" of the brazilian Ministry of Justice said in the video that "Apple sent representatives but backed off", due to "technical problems when embedding the [classification] seal on their AppStore".

The explanation was quite vague, but below the video it says that every video game must be approved by the Ministry of Justice itself, and about 2100 are analyzed per year. I haven't checked the law here, but I believe this is the problem Apple encountered.

Also, there was some uproar about that classification a few years ago, before the AppStore, I believe.

And if I recall correctly, South Africa has the same problem.

[1] http://macmagazine.com.br/2011/03/30/ausencia-de-jogos-na-ap...

jorgecastillo• 15 years ago

I think Linus got it wrong.To me(I am no expert) technologies that work win. People(companies, government, etc) don't really care about openness, they care about usefulness. I believe that when it comes, to choosing a technology for a certain task, the best technology for that task, will tend to win marketshare.

tikhonj3• 15 years ago

What I've found is that it isn't the best technology that wins every time: an option that is good enough but is heavily marketed or backed by a virtual monopoly is likely to beat out better technology.

jsz0• 15 years ago

Hasn't hurt the gaming industry at all. That's probably where things are heading for general purpose computing.

ikeough• 15 years ago

Mr. Torvalds is confusing market freedom with the freedom to install other software on your devices. Market freedom is the ability to choose those products which suit your needs. Given the growth of apple in the last few years, it is quite obviously the case that the "free" market is working. I'm also not entirely sure what he means by "losing in the end". Apple and Micorosft have no responsibility other than to return value to their shareholders. They are, most decidedly, winning in this regard. If he means, losing simply based on adoption of a technology than only time will tell, but even if Apple and Microsoft fall in the long term it will still be an example of the free market at work.

andos• 15 years ago

Then¹:

I actually think secure boot makes a lot of sense. I think we should sign our modules. I think we should use the technology to do cryptographic signatures to add security; and at the same time inside the open source community this is so unpopular that people haven't really worked on it.

Now:

I’m an optimist: openness is successful in the long run, secure boot is another one of these passing fads.

Not implying that he is being incoherent or, even worse, that he cannot change his mind. The passing fad of secure boot meant by Linus is probably using it to lock down a device.

¹. http://www.muktware.com/news/2865 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196098

merryandrew• 15 years ago

If you want an interesting perspective on this idea, check The Master Switch, written by Tim Wu.

http://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Information-Empires-Vint...

Amazon Book Description: It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American information industry–from the telephone to radio to film–once existed in an open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as the Internet does today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist or cartel. In this pathbreaking book, Tim Wu asks: will the Internet follow the same fate? Could the Web–the entire flow of American information–come to be ruled by a corporate leviathan in possession of "the master switch"?

Analyzing the strategic maneuvers of today’s great information powers–Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T–Wu uncovers a time-honored pattern in which invention begets industry and industry begets empire. He shows how a battle royale for Internet’s future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out.

jeffreymcmanus• 15 years ago

The only question here is what "in the end" means.

I can make a bet that, say, OSX won't exist in its current form in twenty years. But that doesn't inform any particular action I should take today. "The end" can be a long time away, and in technology empires rise and fall in a span of three to five years.

leot• 15 years ago

Agree. Long run behavior is mostly useful when deciding between two competing alternatives in which the short-term consequences are unimportant.

I'd assert that the widely-accepted "in the end" kinds notions are noxious, and speak to a "happily ever after" narrative that has always been false. "In the long run we're all dead."

Another such poisonous idea is "the truth will out" -- sure, maybe. But once it does it could no longer matter, and there will likely be other far more significant falsehoods to worry about. Similarly, "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." When it comes to knowledge, this might be translated as "populations can remain ignorant and make stupid decisions long enough to have irreversible disastrous consequences."

larrik2• 15 years ago

Secure Boot isn't a Windows 8 feature, it's an EFI feature that Windows 8 will require. the concern being that Microsoft will convince manufacturers to lock out non-Windows OS's from being installed.

I think that distinction is pretty important.

tankenmate2• 15 years ago

I don't think it is so much Microsoft convincing OEMs to lock out other OSes, it's more like MS relying on OEMs being lazy and not putting the option to load your own keys into the BIOS.

larrik2• 15 years ago

Maybe, maybe not. Microsoft DOES have a history of strong-arming OEMs into being Windows-only. If they get lazy it'll only be because they don't see Linux as a threat anymore.

zokier• 15 years ago

Windows 8 does not require Secure Boot.

hello-trolls• 15 years ago

shaggyfrog• 15 years ago

"Most people want freedom". Yes. Also, most people want their technology to just work. So how about we add: Complicated Technologies Lose in the End.

But we can use Occam's Razor to shave both statements down to the truth: most technologies lose in the end. Because most things go obsolete.

That includes open technologies.

Linus Torvalds: Locked Down Technologies Lose in the End

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