<rant>I just read this article iPhone Coders Miffed Muzzled By Apple s NDA - Webmonkey. Steve Jobs. You can kiss my ass. There is nothing insanely great about Apple, who uses BSD under the hood of their OS for God's sake, and then has draconian and stupid NDA's like the iPhone app developer one. I hope Linux phones bury your iPhone. You can believe me when I say that will never ever use an iPhone. In fact... I'm thinking of selling my iPod classic (not that it has ever been sullied by any DRM iTunes) now too.

What an assualt on our freedoms to have something so potentially cool also be so horribly corrupted by control and fear. If you think your product is best then put your access to it where your mouth is. Open everything up so that it can be freely enjoyed.  Apple frustrates me so much, because the potential is so great. But the constant over-control and fear that is clearly there behind almost every product is just maddening to me. 

Larry Lessig is a genius. This man is a great thinker of our times. I hope that we all listen to him and make the right choice about how content is licensed for use. This is a link to a talk that he did for TED: Ideas worth spreading. Watch it. Learn it. Do it!

You can see his ideas in action at places like Flickr, which provide its users a way to allow others to share and use their artwork in other artistic ways. That is what Creative Commons is all about. Its also what open source is all about.

Our copyright and patent systems have become an abomination. They are now used to fight against the very reason they were created. They were created to increase innovation and ideas, and now they are used with a draconian fist to stifle those ideals.