When the Bough Breaks

More from Mark Pilgrim on his switch:

I’m creating things now that I want to be able to read, hear, watch, search, and filter 50 years from now. Despite all their emphasis on content creators, Apple has made it clear that they do not share this goal. Openness is not a cargo cult. Some get it, some don’t. Apple doesn’t.

It’s obvious he’s been thinking about this for a long time, but I don’t agree with all of it. For example, he’s been bitten by metadata database corruption in both iPhoto and iTunes; I think the solution here is a good backup strategy, not open file formats for the binary metadata stores. Knowing the format of the file won’t help if the corruption is severe; a good back-up will always work.

I agree, though, that closed-format metadata stores are not good long-term archival formats.

★ Friday, 2 June 2006