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> glad people start to see apple is an open source foo creating prisons of software People have been saying it since day 1 of the Apple App Store. It's called

by arkh 6y ago

> glad people start to see apple is an open source foo creating prisons of software People have been saying it since day 1 of the Apple App Store. It's called a walled garden and it should be attacked as the abuse of a dominant position it is.

bluescrn 6y ago
But when a company makes such shiny and popular devices they seem exempt from any usual criticisms of hypercapitalism and near-monopoly power
- simonh 6y ago
  Near monopoly power. We are talking about Macs still, right? Oh I'm against this latest erosion of the ability to run whatever code you want on a Mac. This is one of the reasons I just got one of the new Intel iMacs, because I can see this coming on the ARM side. It's their product though, they legitimately get a monopoly on what features it has, and I don't have any right to tell them how to design it. That's histrionics. There is a legitimate case to be made though as customers as to how we would like to see the product develop. I'm behind that effort 100%.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > Near monopoly power. We are talking about Macs still, right? The problem is that there's only one Apple Developer Program for both iOS and macOS. If you get kicked out of the developer program for reasons related to the iOS App Store, you're also kicked out of independent Mac distribution outside the App Store. You no longer have true independence on the Mac either.
    - simonh 6y ago
      Well, you're using someone else's products (dev tools, compilers, OS libraries) you buy and license from them under certain commercial terms. If you don't like the terms, don't buy them. And to be crystal clear, that's the approach I am personally going to take. I carved off a TB partition and installed Windows 10 and WSL 2 on my new iMac and it runs like a dream. I still need MacOS, and I'll be installing Virtualbox for some stuff. If the Mac gets to the point where I can't run all the applications and tools I need, I'll miss the hardware and the OS and some apps, but I'll jump ship. I hope they listen to us, but I intend to ask and argue, not tell or coerce through legal action.
      - _qulr 6y ago
        > Well, you're using someone else's products (dev tools, compilers, OS libraries) you buy and license from them under certain commercial terms. If you don't like the terms, don't buy them. This doesn't tell the whole story, because terms change. Even open source licenses change. Apple added Gatekeeper to Mac OS X in 2012. Before then, it was a pretty open platform. And other companies such as Microsoft and Google have been known to follow Apple in some respects, so just because one platform has better terms than another at the moment doesn't mean the platform owners can't change their terms on a whim. Apple/Google/Microsoft have close to all of the OS market share on both mobile and desktop, so it's not like there are a lot of choices, especially in the consumer space.
        simonh 6y ago
        They can't change the terms on a product they have already sold to you, but new versions of the OS and dev tools are new products with new features. If you want the new features, you can choose to accept the terms, but you don't have to.
        _qulr 6y ago
        On the user side, there are security updates. Yes, you can refuse to install OS updates that patch vulnerabilities, but obviously that's a big problem for the user. And eventually the vendor stops providing security updates altogether for the hardware. On the developer side, you can't really refuse to use the new versions, because they are required to support your software for the latest OS versions, which is where your customers will be. So if you don't, you lose your customers and go out of business, which is not much of a choice. It's untrue that updates consist of nothing but new features.
      - Perseids 6y ago
        > If you don't like the terms, don't buy them. Do that. I do so as well. But as a rule for society it seldomly works. Too few people are willing or knowledgeable enough to withstand the lure of their individual short term benefit as opposed to the collective cost of their action. I mean, this very feature we are talking about is itself a protection of users against their short term desire: "Let me run this application, I want to see the dancing bunnies" [1] And people fail to do so, even though the downsides are personally and sometimes very immediate. They could research who distributes the file, calculate the trade-off between the remaining uncertainty and the expected reward and come to a rational decision. Or they could just click! Just accept those terms and conditions. Just enter their credit card number on the apple developer product page to get to what they want. And that's what most people do most of the time. It's for this coordination and collective bargaining problem that we need to regulate the shit out of anything that reaches a certain size. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-dancing-bunnies-problem/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-dancing-bunnies-problem/
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Well the other hypercapitalists sell a product that sucks and sure, it lets you run other stuff, but it absolutely tramples on your privacy and is still, for the most part, worse in all aspects. (and yes the keyboard issues were very close to tipping the scales) I wish the choice was simple, but it isn't.
  - rocqua 6y ago
    Does the fact that you think alternatives suck make apple have a monopoly? Sure they have a monopoly on your desires, but that isn't a big enough scale for laws to get involved. There are alternatives out there. So it becomes really hard to claim anti-trust.
    - headmelted 6y ago
      I think it’s really easy to claim anti-trust violations actually. Apple already owns the customer because they’ve invested in the platform, but they’re not providing equitable access to software that other platforms are. This isn’t revealed to the customer though, so it’s not clear as a user that choice is being restricted in this way. A lot of Apple’s practices have been legal up until now due to their minority market share in all markets they operate in - but what we see those markets as is changing. The App Store is a massive multi-billion dollar industry in itself that Apple holds and exploits 100% control over. Whether or not a violation has or is occurring is for lawmakers to decide based on whether or not the App Store (or Google Play for that matter) constitute markets within the definitions provided by local laws.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    If only we had an operating system that we could install on our computers freely, right? It is a shame that people are forced to buy a computer and not reformat the disk to install their OS of choice. It is a shame that we can not take the money that we could be saving and investing in open alternatives...
    - raverbashing 6y ago

by arkh 6y ago

bluescrn 6y ago

But when a company makes such shiny and popular devices they seem exempt from any usual criticisms of hypercapitalism and near-monopoly power

simonh 6y ago
Near monopoly power. We are talking about Macs still, right? Oh I'm against this latest erosion of the ability to run whatever code you want on a Mac. This is one of the reasons I just got one of the new Intel iMacs, because I can see this coming on the ARM side. It's their product though, they legitimately get a monopoly on what features it has, and I don't have any right to tell them how to design it. That's histrionics. There is a legitimate case to be made though as customers as to how we would like to see the product develop. I'm behind that effort 100%.
- _qulr 6y ago
  > Near monopoly power. We are talking about Macs still, right? The problem is that there's only one Apple Developer Program for both iOS and macOS. If you get kicked out of the developer program for reasons related to the iOS App Store, you're also kicked out of independent Mac distribution outside the App Store. You no longer have true independence on the Mac either.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Well, you're using someone else's products (dev tools, compilers, OS libraries) you buy and license from them under certain commercial terms. If you don't like the terms, don't buy them. And to be crystal clear, that's the approach I am personally going to take. I carved off a TB partition and installed Windows 10 and WSL 2 on my new iMac and it runs like a dream. I still need MacOS, and I'll be installing Virtualbox for some stuff. If the Mac gets to the point where I can't run all the applications and tools I need, I'll miss the hardware and the OS and some apps, but I'll jump ship. I hope they listen to us, but I intend to ask and argue, not tell or coerce through legal action.
    - _qulr 6y ago
      > Well, you're using someone else's products (dev tools, compilers, OS libraries) you buy and license from them under certain commercial terms. If you don't like the terms, don't buy them. This doesn't tell the whole story, because terms change. Even open source licenses change. Apple added Gatekeeper to Mac OS X in 2012. Before then, it was a pretty open platform. And other companies such as Microsoft and Google have been known to follow Apple in some respects, so just because one platform has better terms than another at the moment doesn't mean the platform owners can't change their terms on a whim. Apple/Google/Microsoft have close to all of the OS market share on both mobile and desktop, so it's not like there are a lot of choices, especially in the consumer space.
      - simonh 6y ago
        They can't change the terms on a product they have already sold to you, but new versions of the OS and dev tools are new products with new features. If you want the new features, you can choose to accept the terms, but you don't have to.
        _qulr 6y ago
        On the user side, there are security updates. Yes, you can refuse to install OS updates that patch vulnerabilities, but obviously that's a big problem for the user. And eventually the vendor stops providing security updates altogether for the hardware. On the developer side, you can't really refuse to use the new versions, because they are required to support your software for the latest OS versions, which is where your customers will be. So if you don't, you lose your customers and go out of business, which is not much of a choice. It's untrue that updates consist of nothing but new features.
    - Perseids 6y ago
      > If you don't like the terms, don't buy them. Do that. I do so as well. But as a rule for society it seldomly works. Too few people are willing or knowledgeable enough to withstand the lure of their individual short term benefit as opposed to the collective cost of their action. I mean, this very feature we are talking about is itself a protection of users against their short term desire: "Let me run this application, I want to see the dancing bunnies" [1] And people fail to do so, even though the downsides are personally and sometimes very immediate. They could research who distributes the file, calculate the trade-off between the remaining uncertainty and the expected reward and come to a rational decision. Or they could just click! Just accept those terms and conditions. Just enter their credit card number on the apple developer product page to get to what they want. And that's what most people do most of the time. It's for this coordination and collective bargaining problem that we need to regulate the shit out of anything that reaches a certain size. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-dancing-bunnies-problem/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-dancing-bunnies-problem/
raverbashing 6y ago
Well the other hypercapitalists sell a product that sucks and sure, it lets you run other stuff, but it absolutely tramples on your privacy and is still, for the most part, worse in all aspects. (and yes the keyboard issues were very close to tipping the scales) I wish the choice was simple, but it isn't.
- rocqua 6y ago
  Does the fact that you think alternatives suck make apple have a monopoly? Sure they have a monopoly on your desires, but that isn't a big enough scale for laws to get involved. There are alternatives out there. So it becomes really hard to claim anti-trust.
  - headmelted 6y ago
    I think it’s really easy to claim anti-trust violations actually. Apple already owns the customer because they’ve invested in the platform, but they’re not providing equitable access to software that other platforms are. This isn’t revealed to the customer though, so it’s not clear as a user that choice is being restricted in this way. A lot of Apple’s practices have been legal up until now due to their minority market share in all markets they operate in - but what we see those markets as is changing. The App Store is a massive multi-billion dollar industry in itself that Apple holds and exploits 100% control over. Whether or not a violation has or is occurring is for lawmakers to decide based on whether or not the App Store (or Google Play for that matter) constitute markets within the definitions provided by local laws.
- rglullis 6y ago
  If only we had an operating system that we could install on our computers freely, right? It is a shame that people are forced to buy a computer and not reformat the disk to install their OS of choice. It is a shame that we can not take the money that we could be saving and investing in open alternatives...
  - raverbashing 6y ago