Heavy use of drm to support lockin through the iTunes music store. But I was more talking about a class of devices. Sure they support mp3 which can be thought of as a defacto standard but be reminded is patent encumbered. So the ideals of Open Source and Open Standards, which promote open markets is sort of trampled on by the iPod. But then again not many other devices do much better and no one really offers pay for ogg sites beyond the Creative Commons stuff.

What I was trying to point out (but again most people want to argue about why such and such words offended the product of their choice) is that any such device that is based on open standards isn’t going to win by saying it is based on open standards. We need to look why the proprietary devices are winning here (and it is not because of their formats though once they do win they win even more through lockin) and figure out how to emulate that and stop thinking we should be winning simply because we are free (as in freedom). I.E. We need to give the masses what they want, not what we want. iPod is just an example here and not one I care to argue over.

Perhaps a unix analogy would help. Suppose you have a buch of text files and you need to find lines with certain paterns in them. Now do you use grep, or the far more featured and wonderful awk? now suppose you had to pay for grep and awk and you could not afford both (and you can’t use any fancy bash scripting to give awk a grep style interface).

or suppose someone made a superlist program that could do far more than ls. would you bother using it if you didn’t need its new features? what if it was not as good for just listing a directory? what if it would not play nice with pipes to other commands(analogous to how the ipod can plug into lots of devices, mics, fm transmitters, card readers etc)?