A metalhead in a walled garden

I still consider myself a metalhead. My listening history would not back me up.

I think about that whenever the open versus closed argument comes round again, because I am in exactly the same position about software. I believe in open source. I mean it. I think the fact that anyone can read, fork and outlive the things they depend on is one of the genuinely good ideas of my lifetime.

I also do every piece of work I have ever been paid for inside Apple’s walled garden, on their hardware, with their tools, and I like it in here.

For a long time I treated that as a small hypocrisy to be quiet about. Both tribes punish the admission, so most people who hold both positions just pick whichever room they are standing in. I have stopped doing that, because I think the contradiction is fake, and it is fake for a reason worth spelling out.

The argument is not about openness. It is about trust, and both models are asking you to extend it, just to different parties and in different currencies.

Closed asks you to trust that a company’s incentives will stay aligned with yours. That is not a crazy bet. It has paid off for most of my career: things work, they keep working, and I have not had to become a systems administrator to get my job done. It is also a bet with no fallback. The day those incentives diverge, you find out you were a tenant.

Open asks you to trust a community, and, quietly, to trust yourself. In theory you can read the source. In practice, how many of us do? For most people most of the time, “I could audit this” is a comfort rather than a plan. The freedom is real and the exercise of it is mostly theoretical, and pretending otherwise is how open source people end up sounding dishonest to everyone else.

So I hold both. I want the important layers of the world to be open, because the fallback matters more than the convenience when the layer is infrastructure. And I want my own working day to be smooth, so I pay a company to make decisions for me, knowing exactly what I have given up.

What I have stopped doing is pretending the second one is a compromise I was forced into. I chose it. I like it. I just try not to build anything on it that I would be unable to move.