Apple Inc. in a new class-action lawsuit is charged with illegally tying iPods to its iTunes Store in order to forge a monopoly over the digital media market so it can inflate prices, exclude competition, and force consumers to continue to buy into its closed ecosystem.
The one thing Apple does really good is integrate all their products seamlessly. If only they published the specs for all of these integrations so it was an open, level playing field.
As recently reported on Slashdot, Apple, in its infinite wisdom, has added a checksum to the iPod database apparently to restrict non-iTunes products (like Amarok via libgpod) from having the ability to add music. To me this sounds pretty familiar. This is the same thing they did to iTunes 4.5 to make it harder for other apps to read off their DAAP shares, they changed it again in iTunes 7; open source apps are still unable to read iTunes 7 DAAP shares.
But there's better news on this iPod front.
From #gtkpod today:
wtbw: okay guys wtbw: i think we're done. wtbw: let me code something just to check[30 minutes later]
wtbw: can i hear a fuck yeah? wtbw: works for both mine and xamphears :>wtbw suggested donations from thankful users go to Cancer Research UK.
The latest iPods have a cryptographic "checksum" in their song databases that prevents third-party applications from synching with the portable music players. This means that iPods can no longer be used with operating systems where iTunes doesn't exist -- like Linux, where gtkpod and Amarok are common free tools used by iPod owners to load their players.
...
The new hardware limits the number of potential customers for Apple's products, adding engineering cost to a device in order to reduce its functionality. It's hard to understand why Apple would do this, but the most likely explanations are that Apple wants to be sure that competitors can't build their own players to load up iPods -- now that half of the major labels have gone DRM free, it's conceivable that we'd get a Rhapsody or Amazon player that automatically loaded the non-DRM tracks they sold you on your iPod (again, note that this has nothing to do with preventing piracy -- this is about preventing competition with the iTunes Store).
It won't be the first time Apple has rejigged iTunes/iPod to lock out competitors: back when Real built a DRM player for its own music that would run on an iPod, Apple threatened to sue them and engineered a firmware update to break their code (again, nothing to do with fighting piracy). This is the soul of anti-competitiveness: Real made code that iPod owners could use to get more legal use out of their iPods, Apple threatened to sue them for endangering their monopoly over delivering iPod software.
So I got an iPhone. I hate me. A little more so after finding out that Apple is now locking out selected platforms. But my logic was this:
If I were to purchase individual devices to take care of 2, 3 and 4, I could probably spend less than $300. I'd probably spend more to get exactly what I wanted. Instead, I got this. I'm pretty happy with it, though things like closed source, no SDK, etc. don't make me happy. So I hate myself a bit. Especially when people are coming up to me about it at random. Ick. Being "cool" because of an Apple product drives me bananas.
And I plan to offset the extra that will appear on my cell phone bill by switching over to Linode as a VPS from my currently crappy (and unnamed intentionally) provider. The guys at Linode are just great. I'm probably going to sell a camera lens and buy a cheaper one to make up for the cost of the iPhone itself.
