[Taxacom] is apple jeopardizing the access to scientific information or the it developments in our community?

[Donat Agosti]

This issue of the New York Review of Books includes an interesting article
about the iPad which includes a statement that confirms my worries about the
Apple strategy, that is to control: Control how can produce content and
applications for those gadgets. Thought this might be in the first hand too
far off from what we do, but by having somebody that controls what sort of
apps there are, we destroy the freedom of the Internet and with that
eventually close off one of our real big chance to make our not so well
known information accessible. 

 

"The Open Source movement and Creative Commons both derive from the
Internet's essential freedom, a leveling that allows designers and
filmmakers and singers and craftsmen and any number of writers, activists,
politicians, artists, and entrepreneurs, many of them amateurs, to develop
and disseminate their ideas. Imagine what the Internet, and our lives, would
be like if, after inventing the Mosaic Web browser back in 1993, Marc
Andreessen and Eric Bina not only required users to buy it but required
payment for every click or download or page view. Try to imagine how a
privatized, monetized Internet might have developed, and you can't, because
its evolutionary path would have been so different. Apple's iPad apps may be
ingenious. They may be fun and entertaining. They may be useful. What they
can't be is free of Apple's control."

 

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/ipad-revolution/?pagina
tion=false

 

Dr. Donat Agosti

President

Plazi

Research Associate, American Museum of Natural History and Naturmuseum der
Burgergemeinde Bern

Email: agosti at amnh.org

Web:  <http://antbase.org/> http://antbase.org / http://plazi.org

Blog:  <http://biodivcontext.blogspot.com/>
http://biodivcontext.blogspot.com/

Skype: agostileu

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