At the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia, its founder Jimmy Wales, is said to have expressed concern over the amount of engagement that Apple’s iOS is controlling. Considering that Apple controls what applications are let into the store as well as what is accessed on the online store, Wales says it constitutes a closed system. One cannot blame Apple as it is not an act of monopoly but a safeguard against pirating. There are other alternatives to it from Google, the Android software. Wales is not the first to make a statement about Apple’s App Store policy as being open with their policy. The ongoing debate between Google’s Android versus Apple’s iOS has been a long one. Many still think that it would land Apple in trouble with the regulators. Apple is following a closed system. Safari is the native browser for iOS of Apple. Safari is a graphical web browser developed by Apple and distributed for free on the Internet. It was first distributed in January 2007 as a public beta version on the Mac OS X and has been downloadable for free.
When free software is downloaded, one has to get the permission from Apple. This point has been considered a closed system of operation by Wales. However, Wales admitted that while Wikipedia was open in approach to anyone who wishes to make a contribution was too complicated to fine tune and edit. Wales also seemed to play down the Internet neutrality debate and many arguments involved hypothetical dangers.
Wikipedia is an open and free community built website encyclopedia with thousands of articles contributed by its users. Where there is so much of openness, the policies of Apple on free downloads is more of a closed system and this seems to be a threat to the Wikipedia website’s policies of the open net sourcing. The question now is does the proprietary nature of content required for the new age mobiles threaten the open nature of the Internet? The answer is that the market is being split into smaller units by these organizations. Such fragmentation benefits individual companies.
Apple’s censorship looms large in the face of the existing openness of the Internet. Apple controls the working of the Apps Store and the rules are not going to be a boost to innovations.
