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This general problem is a symptom of a major issue regarding the use of software that does not respect the freedom of its users. Every non-apple developer and u

by sudoman 15y ago

This general problem is a symptom of a major issue regarding the use of software that does not respect the freedom of its users. Every non-apple developer and user is required to bend to the will of the programmers who develop the proprietary iOS. Any negative choices or limitations imposed by Apple Inc. are virtually uncircumventable. On the other hand, if users and developers in a community are free to view, modify and share the source code of the operating system and programs they are using, then that creates a dynamic where software cannot remain defective by design, something which cannot be said about Apple's hardware or software. If we were talking about free (as in speech) software, users would have control of their data, and their choice of how to manage it; not some distant programmers working for a corporation's bottom line.

marchdown 15y ago
For the vast majority of developers of iOS apps the specifics of how their data is stored and backed up do not matter. If they were not forced by Apple to adopt this set of constraints they would make decisions on a whim, it would lead to less freedom for user, because where there is uniformity, there is a power to abstract, there is a freedom to not micromanage. Circumventing design decicions is hard. Learning the specifics of particular design is hard practically in the same way. Hacking in an intentionally prohibitive environment is not much different from hacking in an overtly permissive environment — there's a pile of poorly undocumented design decisions which you have to grock before you get anywhere in this system. So the actual difference it political. I won't argue that preventing little Joe to write the coolest Doom clone ever by requiring all software to be cryptographically signed before running it on a particular game console is somehow more evil than forcing him to spend years learning the ropes and working late hours in QA. But I believe that imposing certain constrains on people willing to build on your platform is a good thing, because the resulting uniformity gives the platform more leverage. Whethere the constraints are technical or political /in origin/ is irrelevant.
- scrod 15y ago
  > there is a power to abstract, there is a freedom to not micromanage. Oh, so is that like having freedom from porn now?
  - randallsquared 15y ago
    is that like having freedom from porn now? Well, it is a lot like freedom from worry about what your 10-year-old is doing with the iPhone you bought them. As long as someone offers devices that give you the abilities you want, why begrudge people who want something different?
- vacri 15y ago
  So let's all wear the same clothes, eat the same foods, engage in the same pastimes, work the same hours, walk at the same speeds, drive the same car. Then the only abstraction will be in our dreams - the only place we will be free! Our dreams will then be the blessed relief that we will always look forward to as our own little free moment. Point is, such didactic statements are stupid, as is the whole 'less choice is actually more freedom' mantra. Put it this way. Say the government mandated one phone. One car. One style of house. One fashion outfit. You don't need any more than that. You're freed from having to micromanage your stuff. Sure, you can wear your outfit any way you want, and get your one car in whatever colour, but hey, uniformity breeds freedom from the enduser, right? Because 'micromanagement' is bad, right?
  - Splines 15y ago
    So let's all make our own clothes, grow our own foods, invent our own pastimes, work random hours, ignore road signs, and build our own cars. There's a happy middle, and I think we're approaching it (given the mobile ecosystem, from both sides). I enjoy using iOS, and for most of my apps I don't care where they store it. I do agree that there appears to be a design flaw in iOS surrounding this, but allowing users complete control over their system only allows them (including me) a greater opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot.
    - vacri 15y ago
      But we're already at the happy middle. I don't design my phone hardware, I don't design my operating system, I don't grow my own food... ... but I am free to do all of those, plus free to modify all of those in the way I choose, should I want a better fit. Sure, I may have to be a dev, and have background knowledge in how to engage in some of those, but the capability is there. Granny Jones isn't going to shoot herself in the foot because of some downloaded maps.
      - dextorious 15y ago
        Yes, abstract freedom is great. Now, how about some real freedom. Like the freedom to choose the mobile OS you want, be it "restricted" iOS or "open" Android, or whatever.
scrod 15y ago
Your comment is completely salient and relevant here, but it's received down-votes because it proposes sacrificing profits (i.e., hand-holding, generally cloud-hosted software) for freedom, and Hacker News is simply too sophisticated for such idealism.
- wonderzombie 15y ago
  I find your usage of the word "freedom" here highly suspect. This "freedom" is reserved for a very, very small class of people. Conversely, as much as you might not like it, an experience that hand-holds offers a kind of freedom for people who wouldn't otherwise be able to take advantage of modern hardware and/or software. In theory, there doesn't have to be such a dichotomy between freedom and superior polish/UX. In practice, I feel strongly that there is. The popularity of such hand-holding, "freedom"-restricting devices is also highly suggestive. Depending on where you sit, Android seems to bridge the gap, but as an Android user for years, I'm not completely convinced it's a superior experience. I'm not unsympathetic, but I think the above view is detached from the reality of modern computing as the majority of people experience it.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
rimantas 15y ago
Every non-apple developer and user is required to bend to the will of the programmers who develop the proprietary iOS. How about this: Every non-developer user is required to bend to the will of the programmers who develop the OS. Now tell me, how many of Android users a capable of modifying the OS, and how many of those are willing to.
- sudoman 15y ago
  Android is not a free operating system, but originally claimed to be one. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/09/19/1756241/RMS-Is-Android-Really-Free-Software http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/09/19/1756241/RMS-Is-Androi...
dextorious 15y ago
> This general problem is a symptom of a major issue regarding the use of software that does not respect the freedom of its users. Developers are not users. I don't particularly want my mobile phone to respect the "freedom of its developers". I do want to be sure that no app I install at a whim hogs the disk down, installs spyware or f*ks the phone when I'm in need to make an important call. If I wanted "developer freedom" I'd choose OpenMoko. Strangely, millions of us did not. > Every non-apple developer and user is required to bend to the will of the programmers who develop the proprietary iOS. He's only "required" so if he chooses to use iOS. And if he chooses to use iOS, it's because the platform attracted him, and one thing that attracts a lot of people to it it's the "it just works" and "you don't have to manage it". > Any negative choices or limitations imposed by Apple Inc. are virtually uncircumventable. Yeah. Except if you jailbreak. > On the other hand, if users and developers in a community are free to view, modify and share the source code of the operating system and programs they are using, then that creates a dynamic where software cannot remain defective by design, something which cannot be said about Apple's hardware or software. Yes. Then you get the mighty OpenMoko. Not defective by design. Yay! > If we were talking about free (as in speech) software, users would have control of their data, and their choice of how to manage it; not some distant programmers working for a corporation's bottom line. Yes, for a brief time in college I'd quote RMS too. You'll get over it.
- sudoman 15y ago
  > He's only "required" [to do] so if he chooses to use iOS. And if he chooses to use iOS, it's because the platform attracted him, and one thing that attracts a lot of people to it it's the "it just works" and "you don't have to manage it". That is entirely true, and yes that is part of the problem. The polished nature of a proprietary operating system is like a polished jail. It may be nice and roomy now, but what about in 5 or 10 years when everyone has an iPhone and Apple has one or no competitors? Can we stop them from shrinking our room if there is no free alternative? > Except if you jailbreak Actually, no. You can access the filesystem, but you can't install your own free (or proprietary) operating system on the iPhone because there isn't one. Free software isn't all about nice looking features (though they tend to get developed in time), it's largely about creating a dynamic that ensures the freedom of the user, and that protects them from anti-features, both blatant and subtle. It may not sound like much on the surface, but it's an important issue, especially if someday someone in power says that they don't approve of what you do with your computing devices. The user of a program is controlled by the program and the program is controlled by the programmer. Do you wish to be controlled by someone who won't show you what the program does, and doesn't allow others to make improvements? There _are_ alternatives, and they are not perfect. I don't expect everyone to be an early adopter of every free technology, but there are many, especially at HN, who would be able to use them and to help them grow to the point where most people would be able to use them quite easily. Developing free software is an act of generosity, because it is much needed in our world, where we are becoming so dependent upon computing technology.
lukifer 15y ago
> defective by design, free (as in speech), respect the freedom of its users Is it just me, or has the free software community gotten so disciplined and precise with their talking points that it would make Karl Rove blush? It comes down to this: different people want different things. Some people want Kramer's vision of building your own pizza, both for fun and to get exactly the pizza you want. Most people would rather have pizza driven to their house after a 1 minute phone call, and if they lose some freedom over the exact topping placement and the kind of crust used, they're quite fine with that. Yeah, this was a really boneheaded platform decision, and I'll be very frustrated if Apple doesn't fix it. But you can't seriously tell me that open-source software doesn't sometimes make blunders or suffer from flawed usability. And the idea that I can theoretically crack open the source to my app (the Venn intersection of those with the time, ability, and willingness to do so are a speck, by the way) doesn't help me after the cache is already cleared while I'm sitting on the plane. I don't care whether something is defective by design, or defective by lack of design: I care that it's defective, period. The day that technology vendors start engaging in things like free speech suppression or non-consensual privacy invasion is the day I'm willing to think of computing as being a political issue. What we have here is nothing more than tech which you think sucks, and in this instance, you're very right. If it sucks enough, people will stop buying it, and/or the vendor will make it suck it less. But for god's sake, get off the the soapbox and go back to making things; everybody has exactly as much freedom as they want. tl;dr: FOSS needs to get better at delivering pizzas instead of bitching about Domino's.
- dlss 15y ago
  > I don't care whether something is defective by design, or defective by lack of design: I care that it's defective, period. Interesting. As an engineer, I very much care about causes. Especially systematic ones. They allow me to better reason about the kinds of problems my system is likely to have, and to proactively mitigate them. I believe that sudoman's tl;dr is something like "If Domino's executives ate at Domino's, the pizza would taste better", which is to say that (as for most iOS APIs), Apple's own software almost certainly uses different APIs than what they force developer apps to use. Even if you don't find comments like that interesting, I do. Your comment however (and the other replies to sudoman) miss the point entirely, and instead of discussing why the Domino's executives don't eat Domino's pizza, you spend your time arguing the importance of executives.
muuh-gnu 15y ago
> If we were talking about free software, users would have control of their data; not some distant programmers Example Gnome3, which is free software, even a officially sanctioned GNU project. Overnight, a few key people decide to abandon the traditional desktop metaphor, against the will of a majority of their users and to the detriment of the whole linux desktop. The users hated it and are still hating it, but nobody has the ressources to modify it. Nobody has even the ressources to keep Gnome2 alive, let alone fork Gnome3. Yes, in theory users could make only those changes they want, but only in theory. In practice, if a significantly influential player says that Gnome2 is gone, Gnome2 is gone. Even if iOS was free software, if Apple decided to make a change, they would be still big enough to force a majority of users to accept their way.
- danssig 15y ago
  Wonderful comment. This is one reason I always laughed at the argument "yea, but... we have all the source code!". Great, so the solution is we pay to maintain it? How is this free again?
  - seabee 15y ago
    The unsaid thing about freedoms is you cannot exercise them unless you have the means to do so. If you don't have that, the only value freedoms afford you is aspirational. Given that the potential to do something is worth a whole lot less than the activity itself, it's easy to see why FOSS is in is current state and will remain that way for a long time.
    - gbog 15y ago
      Then you would drop freedom of speech just because it is useless unless you own CNN?
      - seabee 15y ago
        Nobody is suggesting that. In any case it's a false comparison, since anybody has the ability to fully exercise their freedom of speech. To exercise your open-source freedoms fully require skills, time, and/or money (to pay others to do it for you).
epo 15y ago
The older I get the less tolerant I get of wild-eyed zealots like this. This sloganizing reminds me of the Mao days when lots of impressionable youths would wave the little red book and unthinkingly chant extracts, this is really no different.
- epo 15y ago
  Ooh! downvotes without explanation, herd mentality or hurd mentality?

by sudoman 15y ago

marchdown 15y ago

For the vast majority of developers of iOS apps the specifics of how their data is stored and backed up do not matter. If they were not forced by Apple to adopt this set of constraints they would make decisions on a whim, it would lead to less freedom for user, because where there is uniformity, there is a power to abstract, there is a freedom to not micromanage. Circumventing design decicions is hard. Learning the specifics of particular design is hard practically in the same way. Hacking in an intentionally prohibitive environment is not much different from hacking in an overtly permissive environment — there's a pile of poorly undocumented design decisions which you have to grock before you get anywhere in this system. So the actual difference it political. I won't argue that preventing little Joe to write the coolest Doom clone ever by requiring all software to be cryptographically signed before running it on a particular game console is somehow more evil than forcing him to spend years learning the ropes and working late hours in QA. But I believe that imposing certain constrains on people willing to build on your platform is a good thing, because the resulting uniformity gives the platform more leverage. Whethere the constraints are technical or political /in origin/ is irrelevant.

scrod 15y ago
> there is a power to abstract, there is a freedom to not micromanage. Oh, so is that like having freedom from porn now?
- randallsquared 15y ago
  is that like having freedom from porn now? Well, it is a lot like freedom from worry about what your 10-year-old is doing with the iPhone you bought them. As long as someone offers devices that give you the abilities you want, why begrudge people who want something different?
vacri 15y ago
So let's all wear the same clothes, eat the same foods, engage in the same pastimes, work the same hours, walk at the same speeds, drive the same car. Then the only abstraction will be in our dreams - the only place we will be free! Our dreams will then be the blessed relief that we will always look forward to as our own little free moment. Point is, such didactic statements are stupid, as is the whole 'less choice is actually more freedom' mantra. Put it this way. Say the government mandated one phone. One car. One style of house. One fashion outfit. You don't need any more than that. You're freed from having to micromanage your stuff. Sure, you can wear your outfit any way you want, and get your one car in whatever colour, but hey, uniformity breeds freedom from the enduser, right? Because 'micromanagement' is bad, right?
- Splines 15y ago
  So let's all make our own clothes, grow our own foods, invent our own pastimes, work random hours, ignore road signs, and build our own cars. There's a happy middle, and I think we're approaching it (given the mobile ecosystem, from both sides). I enjoy using iOS, and for most of my apps I don't care where they store it. I do agree that there appears to be a design flaw in iOS surrounding this, but allowing users complete control over their system only allows them (including me) a greater opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot.
  - vacri 15y ago
    But we're already at the happy middle. I don't design my phone hardware, I don't design my operating system, I don't grow my own food... ... but I am free to do all of those, plus free to modify all of those in the way I choose, should I want a better fit. Sure, I may have to be a dev, and have background knowledge in how to engage in some of those, but the capability is there. Granny Jones isn't going to shoot herself in the foot because of some downloaded maps.
    - dextorious 15y ago
      Yes, abstract freedom is great. Now, how about some real freedom. Like the freedom to choose the mobile OS you want, be it "restricted" iOS or "open" Android, or whatever.

scrod 15y ago

Your comment is completely salient and relevant here, but it's received down-votes because it proposes sacrificing profits (i.e., hand-holding, generally cloud-hosted software) for freedom, and Hacker News is simply too sophisticated for such idealism.

wonderzombie 15y ago
I find your usage of the word "freedom" here highly suspect. This "freedom" is reserved for a very, very small class of people. Conversely, as much as you might not like it, an experience that hand-holds offers a kind of freedom for people who wouldn't otherwise be able to take advantage of modern hardware and/or software. In theory, there doesn't have to be such a dichotomy between freedom and superior polish/UX. In practice, I feel strongly that there is. The popularity of such hand-holding, "freedom"-restricting devices is also highly suggestive. Depending on where you sit, Android seems to bridge the gap, but as an Android user for years, I'm not completely convinced it's a superior experience. I'm not unsympathetic, but I think the above view is detached from the reality of modern computing as the majority of people experience it.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

rimantas 15y ago

Every non-apple developer and user is required to bend to the will of the programmers who develop the proprietary iOS. How about this: Every non-developer user is required to bend to the will of the programmers who develop the OS. Now tell me, how many of Android users a capable of modifying the OS, and how many of those are willing to.

sudoman 15y ago
Android is not a free operating system, but originally claimed to be one. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/09/19/1756241/RMS-Is-Android-Really-Free-Software http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/09/19/1756241/RMS-Is-Androi...

dextorious 15y ago

> This general problem is a symptom of a major issue regarding the use of software that does not respect the freedom of its users. Developers are not users. I don't particularly want my mobile phone to respect the "freedom of its developers". I do want to be sure that no app I install at a whim hogs the disk down, installs spyware or f*ks the phone when I'm in need to make an important call. If I wanted "developer freedom" I'd choose OpenMoko. Strangely, millions of us did not. > Every non-apple developer and user is required to bend to the will of the programmers who develop the proprietary iOS. He's only "required" so if he chooses to use iOS. And if he chooses to use iOS, it's because the platform attracted him, and one thing that attracts a lot of people to it it's the "it just works" and "you don't have to manage it". > Any negative choices or limitations imposed by Apple Inc. are virtually uncircumventable. Yeah. Except if you jailbreak. > On the other hand, if users and developers in a community are free to view, modify and share the source code of the operating system and programs they are using, then that creates a dynamic where software cannot remain defective by design, something which cannot be said about Apple's hardware or software. Yes. Then you get the mighty OpenMoko. Not defective by design. Yay! > If we were talking about free (as in speech) software, users would have control of their data, and their choice of how to manage it; not some distant programmers working for a corporation's bottom line. Yes, for a brief time in college I'd quote RMS too. You'll get over it.

sudoman 15y ago
> He's only "required" [to do] so if he chooses to use iOS. And if he chooses to use iOS, it's because the platform attracted him, and one thing that attracts a lot of people to it it's the "it just works" and "you don't have to manage it". That is entirely true, and yes that is part of the problem. The polished nature of a proprietary operating system is like a polished jail. It may be nice and roomy now, but what about in 5 or 10 years when everyone has an iPhone and Apple has one or no competitors? Can we stop them from shrinking our room if there is no free alternative? > Except if you jailbreak Actually, no. You can access the filesystem, but you can't install your own free (or proprietary) operating system on the iPhone because there isn't one. Free software isn't all about nice looking features (though they tend to get developed in time), it's largely about creating a dynamic that ensures the freedom of the user, and that protects them from anti-features, both blatant and subtle. It may not sound like much on the surface, but it's an important issue, especially if someday someone in power says that they don't approve of what you do with your computing devices. The user of a program is controlled by the program and the program is controlled by the programmer. Do you wish to be controlled by someone who won't show you what the program does, and doesn't allow others to make improvements? There _are_ alternatives, and they are not perfect. I don't expect everyone to be an early adopter of every free technology, but there are many, especially at HN, who would be able to use them and to help them grow to the point where most people would be able to use them quite easily. Developing free software is an act of generosity, because it is much needed in our world, where we are becoming so dependent upon computing technology.

lukifer 15y ago

> defective by design, free (as in speech), respect the freedom of its users Is it just me, or has the free software community gotten so disciplined and precise with their talking points that it would make Karl Rove blush? It comes down to this: different people want different things. Some people want Kramer's vision of building your own pizza, both for fun and to get exactly the pizza you want. Most people would rather have pizza driven to their house after a 1 minute phone call, and if they lose some freedom over the exact topping placement and the kind of crust used, they're quite fine with that. Yeah, this was a really boneheaded platform decision, and I'll be very frustrated if Apple doesn't fix it. But you can't seriously tell me that open-source software doesn't sometimes make blunders or suffer from flawed usability. And the idea that I can theoretically crack open the source to my app (the Venn intersection of those with the time, ability, and willingness to do so are a speck, by the way) doesn't help me after the cache is already cleared while I'm sitting on the plane. I don't care whether something is defective by design, or defective by lack of design: I care that it's defective, period. The day that technology vendors start engaging in things like free speech suppression or non-consensual privacy invasion is the day I'm willing to think of computing as being a political issue. What we have here is nothing more than tech which you think sucks, and in this instance, you're very right. If it sucks enough, people will stop buying it, and/or the vendor will make it suck it less. But for god's sake, get off the the soapbox and go back to making things; everybody has exactly as much freedom as they want. tl;dr: FOSS needs to get better at delivering pizzas instead of bitching about Domino's.

dlss 15y ago
> I don't care whether something is defective by design, or defective by lack of design: I care that it's defective, period. Interesting. As an engineer, I very much care about causes. Especially systematic ones. They allow me to better reason about the kinds of problems my system is likely to have, and to proactively mitigate them. I believe that sudoman's tl;dr is something like "If Domino's executives ate at Domino's, the pizza would taste better", which is to say that (as for most iOS APIs), Apple's own software almost certainly uses different APIs than what they force developer apps to use. Even if you don't find comments like that interesting, I do. Your comment however (and the other replies to sudoman) miss the point entirely, and instead of discussing why the Domino's executives don't eat Domino's pizza, you spend your time arguing the importance of executives.

muuh-gnu 15y ago

> If we were talking about free software, users would have control of their data; not some distant programmers Example Gnome3, which is free software, even a officially sanctioned GNU project. Overnight, a few key people decide to abandon the traditional desktop metaphor, against the will of a majority of their users and to the detriment of the whole linux desktop. The users hated it and are still hating it, but nobody has the ressources to modify it. Nobody has even the ressources to keep Gnome2 alive, let alone fork Gnome3. Yes, in theory users could make only those changes they want, but only in theory. In practice, if a significantly influential player says that Gnome2 is gone, Gnome2 is gone. Even if iOS was free software, if Apple decided to make a change, they would be still big enough to force a majority of users to accept their way.

danssig 15y ago
Wonderful comment. This is one reason I always laughed at the argument "yea, but... we have all the source code!". Great, so the solution is we pay to maintain it? How is this free again?
- seabee 15y ago
  The unsaid thing about freedoms is you cannot exercise them unless you have the means to do so. If you don't have that, the only value freedoms afford you is aspirational. Given that the potential to do something is worth a whole lot less than the activity itself, it's easy to see why FOSS is in is current state and will remain that way for a long time.
  - gbog 15y ago
    Then you would drop freedom of speech just because it is useless unless you own CNN?
    - seabee 15y ago
      Nobody is suggesting that. In any case it's a false comparison, since anybody has the ability to fully exercise their freedom of speech. To exercise your open-source freedoms fully require skills, time, and/or money (to pay others to do it for you).

epo 15y ago

The older I get the less tolerant I get of wild-eyed zealots like this. This sloganizing reminds me of the Mao days when lots of impressionable youths would wave the little red book and unthinkingly chant extracts, this is really no different.

epo 15y ago
Ooh! downvotes without explanation, herd mentality or hurd mentality?