>>I sympathise with the sentiment expressed but must point out that there is no market force that prefers un-established open products to established walled gardens save for a fraction of hackers' tastes and preferences.
The point isn't that established players are immortal. It is that the role of open v closed in that usurpation process is negligible.
Closed systems overturn open systems just as much as the other way around (or closed v closed or open v open). Very few people outside hacker culture care whether what they use is open or closed.
I'm weary of using structured data, that is data that is structured in such a way that you don't need to understand what it's passing around. Keeping it simple means that the developer will always know exactly what data is being passed around.
This is important for a lot of reasons not all of them are related to only development as a job.
Large companies have known for a long time that your dataset is more important than your algorithms.
Data is facts and algorithms are basically opinions of the developer. A smarter developer may have more correct opinions on how data is related, but it will always be skewed by the limited perspective of the developer.
Yes, there was an app that had a back-door built into it so the app could be secretly used to jail-break the device it was running on. This was pulled from the market.
Oh, yes there is, it's called change.