Who’s the More Open Platform? Apple or Microsoft
February 21, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
As I was watching yet another commercial for the Apple iPhone about all the applications that are available and the reference of there being an application for just about everything, it reminded me of something that used to have that same feature.
Remember the Palm OS? That was open and there were hundreds of applications that were written by just about anyone to be used on a Palm device.
I then started thinking about whether or not this was really the same type of openness that’s being exhibited by Apple.
I’ve never developed a Palm app or an Apple. I’m not sure if it’s a similar process or not, maybe someone can enlighten me on the differences or similarities in the comments.
The open aspect of the iPhone actually surprises me because I would consider Apple a very closed system. I don’t see any custom software written for the Mac OS. Does it exist? Can it be done at all?
Sravan Bhamidipati posted about Microsoft’s history of open-source recently which I believe is the main context of open-source, but I’d say the Windows platform is very open isn’t it? I mean anyone can write a simple program or application that runs on Windows right? Can that be done on a Mac?
That makes me think Microsoft is far more open than Apple. Or am I just confused or ignorant about the whole situation? Someone please educate me on the difference.
Both Apple and Microsoft provide SDKs (Software Development Kits) that expose their product capabilities to at least one general programing languages (like C, Objective-C, C#, Java…). Thats the way you get programs to run on MacOS, same as in windows. And it has nothing to do with openness. You don’t get so see how did they invented or break anything: SDKs are in binary format no source code is available to learn from or to fix.
Thanks for that clarification and insight. Not sure why I didn’t realize the difference in those two levels of code. I think there’s a place for open source software, but I also believe that a company shouldn’t be forced or challenged for making the decision to not have their core code “open”.