An interesting take on the battle of open / closed …. apple / google …. apple / adobe – etc – without too much getting on the band wagon – but rather coming at the open v closed issue from a design perspective.
Not sure I totally agree with him but I sure don’t reject it either, and haven’t got an argument against – so what – conflicted ? Yes – because I love Apple and I love Open Source. And that right there is a seeming conflict.
I took the piece as a kind of metaphor / allegory / parable – I just can’t bring the right word to mind for the battle all creative professionals (and in this category I include the ‘poets of the internet’ [that would be the coders] are currently facing. As ‘the price’ gets close to zero – how do you make money? And if ‘we’ all want to pay nothing to others – but we want them to pay us for our art, photographs, design etc – how does that reconcile?
It is another tension that we have in the market place.
Tools are making $$$ less relevant and talent MORE relevant – the way it SHOULD BE!
Anyway – take a read – enjoy – agree or not – it isn’t the end of the world either way 
Extract From David Malouf’s piece:
Because open systems people lack patience and strategic thinking. Yup! I said it. There ya go! With very few exceptions (ok, Mozilla you’re off the hook), OSS systems have failed to deliver mainstream, compelling, engaging, successful products.
As I listened to Apple talk about what they did to make their implementation of Multi-tasking work, it just started to really crystalize for me one salient point about Apple.
It is not about the right feature, but the right feature done right at the right time.
This means being thorough. It means understanding the ins and outs of your system. It means being patient until both design and engineering get it right, and not just get it done.
This level of intentionality is something that open systems can’t deploy well if at all. If everyone is free, then no one waits. No one considers. No one designs.
And to save you the click through – ‘he’ (the writer of this oiece) is but one voice, name David Malouf and according to his web site:
David Malouf is currently a Professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department of the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD).
Before taking this position, David was a Sr. Interaction Design for Motorola Enterprise Mobility where he designed software, webware, and hardware interactions and interfaces. Motorola was the last in a 15 year journey of practicing interaction design, information architecture, UI design, project management and other roles and positions working almost exclusively with thin client technologies.
Read the full article here : Why people who favor open systems are at a disadvantage?
Passed on – with thanks to Daniel S