How is that against the grain for Apple? Apple is known for design and quality but I never thought of them as especially open. Sure, they argued for openness where it served them as a 3% player in the OS space, but now that they're a 70+% player in music, more openness would hurt them.
Openness hurts the big boys, so you hardly ever see the big boys pushing for it. Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web, but not with any aspect of their own business (hiring practices, pictures of campus, PageRank formula, infrastructure, etc).
> Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web, but not with any aspect of their own business (hiring practices, pictures of campus, PageRank formula, infrastructure, etc).
IIRC, Joel Spolsky called this "commoditizing your complement."
Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web
I'm not sure what you mean. Google is gradually opening its technology - you see one announcement after another these days.
And here lies the difference between Google and Apple: both benefited from the open-source world big time, except the former contributes back as an acknowledgement, and the latter contributes nothing.
Openness hurts the big boys, so you hardly ever see the big boys pushing for it. Google is happy to be open with the contents of the entire Web, but not with any aspect of their own business (hiring practices, pictures of campus, PageRank formula, infrastructure, etc).