I may be taking this too far, but I think there’s more to it than IE. Many in the “hacker” community seem to wrap themselves in the flag of “open”, but only when it’s in their favour.
It’s the people who argue for a decentralized, open-source alternative to Facebook, but embrace Google+. It’s the people who explain how terrible it is to tie your business to a single vendor, but decide to build businesses on iOS. It’s the people who tell you they would never put any personal documents on the cloud, but embrace Dropbox. It’s the people who claim to support open, DRM-free data formats and think the Khan Academy is the future of education, but think iBooks textbooks are great.
Like I said, I don’t have a particularly strong attachment to open source and open data formats — I just hate the way people use openness and standards as a prop. Saying standards aren’t necessary when WebKit has neat new features is (loosely) analogous to only supporting democracy when the party you vote for wins.
It’s the people who argue for a decentralized, open-source alternative to Facebook, but embrace Google+. It’s the people who explain how terrible it is to tie your business to a single vendor, but decide to build businesses on iOS. It’s the people who tell you they would never put any personal documents on the cloud, but embrace Dropbox. It’s the people who claim to support open, DRM-free data formats and think the Khan Academy is the future of education, but think iBooks textbooks are great.
Like I said, I don’t have a particularly strong attachment to open source and open data formats — I just hate the way people use openness and standards as a prop. Saying standards aren’t necessary when WebKit has neat new features is (loosely) analogous to only supporting democracy when the party you vote for wins.