December 11, 2008, 4:12 AM — There are many reasons why I am amused when I read others dishing out advice to Apple, but chief among them is that the company has done quite well for itself over the past ten years or so, generally not taking the course analysts suggest more often than is statistically significant. But heck, it's not just analysts who are in the business of telling Apple how to make less money doing stupid things; open source enthusiasts are also doing so, on Slashdot!
I am not by any stretch of the imagination an open source hater, but I also don't buy the idea that everything should be open source. If you believe that for ideological reasons, fair enough, though I disagree with you; but what I don't get are the folks who seem to believe that open source will automatically make you more money than you're making now. This is almost never true, and it's particularly not true for companies like Apple, which value seamless user experiences more than a rock-solid technical back-end.
Nevertheless, this has not stopped enthusiasts from porting Linux to the iPhone, and God bless 'em for it, but that doesn't make it a good business decision for Apple to do the same as a matter of policy.
(I was going to make a crack that people only demand the open-sourcing of gadgets that are already popular and successful, but that was before I discovered this blurry video purporting to show Linux running on a Zune.)
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