I think Gruber is wrong and Doctorow is right.  

Apple is eating our seed corn. That's why you should buy one Eee PC for every iPad you buy. Buy something that you can pervert in any way you want. Something you can plug anything into. Buy something you can copy all your data out of. If you must have an iPad, then buy (and use) something open to balance things out. Buy a Mac if you like. Or something that runs Linux. It doesn't have to be open source. It just has to be an open box.  

If we don't have open boxes lying around we'll wake up 20 years from now and wonder why there are no more hippie programmers, like Woz. Sheez, like Jobs was when he was a kid.  

We also need some VCs to compete with Twitter and FourSquare. There are more ideas out there than Fred and Bijan can finance. We need more user-VCs. 

Gotta run to the NYC Hackathon now. I'll expand on this some more later if there's interest. 

Update: Pictures from the Hackathon start here.