sandwichesandapples

I wasn’t aware of this until today but MIT has released all of their graduate and undergraduate course material under a Creative Commons license. It’s a brilliant and humanitarian effort. Every school should follow suit. Information wants to be free.

I’ve been greatly debating whether or not to purchase the new iPhone next week. I want the convenience of the internet on my phone but I have a gut distrust of Apple and AT&T. Whenever I talk about it with friends, I realize I sound like a crazy person because I say things like, “I don’t want to use iTunes” and they think, “What’s the big deal about iTunes?”

But I realize the big deal to me is choice. I don’t want to be locked down. I don’t run iTunes on my iPod and I don’t even run Mac’s OS on my Mac. I like variety. I like choice. I think it was Reason’s Nick Gillespie who said (probably in much better language), “Freedom means being able to opt out.”

With Apple, opting out is always difficult. But I do. And I will again. Because I’m planning on buying the iPhone. After all, no one else is offering the internet on a mobile device like they are. But the minute the Google Phone appears with its open source operating system, I’ll jump ship. I’ll leave AT&T and Apple and sure there will be a penalty to pay. But getting a customer to pay a one time penalty for breaking a contract isn’t exactly good business. Good business is giving the customer choice.

On second thought, maybe I’ll just buy the OpenMoko.

UPDATE: And now this news, new OpenMoko on sale July 4th.

Whenever I show people Songbird or they see me using it, they’re all like, “Wow, what is that?” So I guess not too many people know about it.

Songbird is basically a browser built for finding and downloading music. I’ve been using the developer releases for about 2 years but they’ve finally released a public alpha version. Songbird lets you search for, listen to, download and playback music on the web. It’s rad.