If root did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. In a world with only closed systems, commercial success would still be tied to the development of third party apps, but the responsibility to train developers and introduce people to programming would fall to the gatekeeper of each system, rather than it being something that can organically happen. So, Apple, or Microsoft, or whoever, would be shipping programming sandboxes for their devices; maybe scripting tools, maybe programming games, maybe cut-down versions of the professional development environment. Whatever it would be, if there was no open ecosystem to learn in, a closed system to learn would be created. The idea that people would not become programmers in 1995 because they can’t do everything to a single closed system in an otherwise open industry today is a fallacy. If the first computers had been closed, everything would be different, right down to the seeds that inspired our initial passions for software development.

Myself, on my other blog

Posted about hacking in closed systems, my favourite Mac OSX hacks, and how in a new, closed world that has reinvented many of the common expectations of computers, we have to rediscover hacking. I’m confident the native parts of iPhone OS won’t be closed forever, but in the interim, this post talks about how the Web, and the bookmarklet mechanism of web browsers, is the first port of call for open scripting on an iPad.

(Also: Importing my posts in full is going to have to wait, Tumblr appears to have designed against what I want to do.) Via: benward.me.