iPhone matures the "free your phone" movement

We've been using locked down phones and been served proprietary content by single providers for quite a while now, but it looks like it took the iPhone buzz for enough people to start opposing this for it to become a seed of a movement, or at least an extension of existing movements into new areas (Free Software and Free Culture movements).

This is interesting because it illustrates that sometimes it is not until a concerned technology matures or simply reaches a certain point of evolution that social issues that surround it gain enough attention. Maybe this is because with the maturation of the concerned technology, the system of control tied to it matures as well, becoming too draconian to ignore.

In any case, this is what is happening today with the iPhone. Chained to AT&T and locked within an Apple playground, iPhone users don't get to escape easily (if they want to hold on to their shiny new phone). They've been turned into consumers rather than what every human being naturally is, a creator as well. You get a phone with a certain impressive set of features, no more no less and that's it; take it or leave it. If you take it, you're theirs, even though you may think that the phone you just payed for is yours. Try running it without Apple and AT&T and then tell us if you really own it.

When I say that humans are creators I don't merely mean that everyone necessarily has to be making videos using these phones. Something as simple as choosing between various options can be a creative endeavor as well, something that iPhone doesn't quite enable.

This is why FreeTheIPhone.org project is born, but even better, why OpenMoko project exists. While some are trying to free the locked down device, others are creating a free unlocked device from the start, and a whole software framework to go with it.

And so, as the mobile "phone" technology finally matured to this point, we are clearly seeing the two sides that were already obvious in the world of PCs and laptops at large. In many ways, mobile computer devices (which they essentially are) such as iPhone are just an extension of this world, only with certain additional peculiarities that have to be dealth with (such as mobile carriers).