For all the discussion of the importance of transparency and openness on the Internet today, it is very telling that the world fastest growing mobile platform can be the most property.

Apple has won rave reviews (including from me) for its technology, but certainly not for their commitment to sharing its innovations with the world … unless, of course, you’ll fork over $ 299 and sign a two-year mobile telephony obligations.

Moreover, Apple has earned the dubious honor of being more closed than Microsoft.

And yet, as Marc Hedlund shows more than O’Reilly Radar, the use of growth for the iPhone that dwarfs the former leader in the smartphone category, PalmOS:

If you open as many questions as to why Apple do so well with its proprietary Uber iPhone, just as Microsoft dominates the desktop Windows with the property?

There are at least two answers. One is that while Apple iPhone (for example, in Microsoft Windows) is not open to the open source sense, it is open in the sense that it is easy to create applications that run on it. The second reason is that there is a huge financial incentive to do so, given the momentum behind the platform.

For some of these reasons are not good enough, such as Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker:

Many of us participate in closed systems, which set rules for us, and we do not see them, of course, can not change them, and not allowed to “participate” in creating the rules. This is a very popular web-based services. For example, I “participated” in the Flickr and Facebook, but within the system and rules that they created for their own purposes. This is fine, there is no reason to change these facilities.

Mozilla is trying to build a layer of the Internet, which differ from the other, where “participation” also extends to the very essence of what we build.

With 40 percent of Mozilla Firefox, written for investors, it is clear that an open platform to build the best browser Mozilla, Mozilla, therefore, continues to improve ways in which developers can contribute to it. But it is clear that there are other ways to be “open to participation” in ways that pay for the rental of Apple, Microsoft, and the vast ecosystem of business partners.

It is a single platform approach is better than another?

While it is clear that the world is a place for both the property, but an open and fairly-pureplay open approaches to the creation of a platform, I have a more open approach. The reason is that, ultimately, it appears property approaches might collapse under their own weight.

Take Windows, for example. To maintain its growth, Microsoft had to include more and more functions into the operating system, stepping on the toes (or simply devouring socks), his former partners. (Interestingly, in discussing the issues, whether it is open to Apple over Google Android, Slate described in Microsoft Windows approach is an open question.)

After all, Windows has grown to such proportion of the market, including partners of Microsoft, have begun to seek alternatives to open, causing then Microsoft chairman Bill Gates at the Dub Linux Microsoft in “the most powerful operating system competitor.” The “well enough” operating system to perform certain tasks more efficiently and powerfully than Windows has grown to a serious threat to Microsoft in the different applications and markets.

In the end, even Microsoft could threaten the dominance of desktop Linux as a new class of easy-to-use, cost-effective device, as Netbooks arise.

Back to Apple. Today, Apple iPhone, how to set up to rule the world, because it allows a huge community of developers of applications to achieve the payment of the audience. Tomorrow, Google (Android / Linux), Nokia (Symbian, Linux), Palm (WebOS / Linux), and even Microsoft (Windows Mobile) threaten her cozy corralling the mobile market.

Microsoft has made clear that it is possible to build a massive business with a “fairly open approach to the development platform. The question is, can Microsoft (and Apple) have argued that without a truly open?