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.
juan carlos