We Favor Open Over Closed

Since the very first telephone companies and there is an ongoing struggle between advocates (and adversaries) of open vs. closed systems. Today is the time of the closed systems.

The Apple II was wide open and while the first Mac hardware was the exact opposite you could still do whatever your wanted in software. Even if there were no official hooks for this and that, as long as you knew how to access something there was no one holding you back.

iPhones and iPads, iOS in general, perfect Steve Job’s vision. From hardware to software they are completely closed. Unless you jailbreak iOS devices nothing can be done with them that is not under Apple’s control; even the Lightning cables you use to connect them to USB contain a proprietary chip that Apple only licenses under a set of strict rules. The Mac with OS X is moving into the same direction albeit very slow. More, web services such as Twitter often start open first and close up eventually.

We at DEVONtechnologies clearly favor open over closed.

DEVONthink gathers your data in one place but neither holds it hostage nor does it ever upload your data to anywhere without you saying where. You can get your documents out of DEVONthink at any time and in the original format. DEVONthink Pro and up even come with scripts that give you an app-independent backup of all your documents. From DEVONagent Pro you can export search results in any way you like, and if there’s something we haven’t thought of our extreme AppleScript support is an open door for your extensions.

We will, of course, also continue to offer our apps in our own shop as long as the Mac platform permits.