Jordy Blog

Walled Gardens and Open Source

I posted the other day about how universal wishlists are one of the ways the walls of traditional marketing are coming down. In a broader sense, this trend is going on all over the place: the walls of the walled gardens are coming down as big companies realize that customers don’t like to be corralled. Even the quintessentially walled AOL is allowing users to access their Yahoo mail through AOL. They’re still a long way from not sucking, but they’re making steps.

Still remarkably walled: Apple. I understand that uniformity is a big part of their branding, but I predict some of the those walls will come down. Competition from open platforms (like Rockbox for the iPod and Android as an answer to the iPhone SDK) practically ensures it.

And the greatest enemy to walled gardens (at least in the software world): open source. It’s big enough now that even regular folks should start figuring out what it’s all about. Open source is the reason Firefox kicks IE’s butt in terms of useabilty.

Read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar for an excellent treatise on the way open source is changing the software world.

Photo credit: historyanorak

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Rockbox Rocks

Over the weekend I installed Rockbox on my iPod, and let me just say that I love my iPod again.

I love that I can rate podcasts. I love that I can delete a song right from my iPod. I love that I can play Ogg Vorbis files. I love that I can make dynamic playlists on the fly based on song metadata.

Rockbox is not only functional, it's themeable! :)

There are numberous other features as well. Because it’s an open-source platform, the possibilities really are limitless. You can even play Doom on it, although I don’t know who would really want that.  :)  Also, it dual boots into the Apple Firmware, so I could easily switch back if I ran into problems.

Lastly, Rockbox was surprisingly super easy to install: there’s a simple wizard that walks you through it. You don’t even need to backup your music. (I still did though, only because I didn’t know it wasn’t necessary.)

Next step: Giving my songs sane filenames instead of Apple’s hidden nosensical hex-based names.

Finally my iPod is being beaten into submission. :)

SSS is Apple’s Featured Download

Jake Spurlock IMed me pointing out that the Mac version of the Software for Starving Students CD is listed as Apple’s featured download for Mac OS X. This is great exposure for the project. Good work team. :)