Open or Complete?

A man is incomplete until he is married. After that, he is finished. - Zsa Zsa Gabor

For the last five years I have been trying to understand the tension between enterprise or proprietary development and open source development. A prominent example has been the competition between the iPhone and the Android operating system.

When it first came out, Android was pretty clunky, and wireless carriers were adding crapware and strange “custom” components to inflate airtime billing. By contrast, the iPhone was practically perfect, the realization of Steve Jobs vision of a smartphone. With an iPhone, you just power it up and start using it.

iPhone was the early smartphone leader, transforming mobile communication. We were entering the future! Today, by what I read, there are more Android phones than iPhones sold every day, made possible by the incredible leverage of the open source model...