4 ms·

I see your point. It's a good one, and I sort of agree with you, but I also think it's more complicated than that. For example, it's hard to say whether the si

I see your point. It's a good one, and I sort of agree with you, but I also think it's more complicated than that. For example, it's hard to say whether the six years of code search we got from google was better or worse than what a sustainable startup could have provided. And if was better, how do you measure that against its sudden disappearance until there's some viable replacement (if there will ever be one). It's also hard to say whether it was ever possible to run it sustainably. I think for every code search, there's an equally unsustainable (at first) Google product that provides a lot of value for free to users. Yes, sometimes it means that they kill opportunities for others who could possible make sustainable businesses, but it also means that they can run something unsustainably for some period of time to see whether it's worth it to even make sustainable. It's hard to say whether overall for society there have been more cons than pros. Anecdotally, my experience is that Google has provided me a lot of value for free.

saurik 15y ago
I am not certain if you saw the edit I added to my previous comment (I added it reasonably immediately, but you also responded within 10 minutes, so maybe you missed it), but I believe it addresses some of these points; I will restate, however, more directly targeting this post, just in case. Google doesn't seem to try to make things sustainably, and in this case didn't even try their bread-and-butter business model (ads), possibly because to them the result would have been "chump change", whereas to a smaller company it might have been "enough to man a few bright people" (which I'd argue is enough to have something great occur). I'll add, though, that these services Google (or the VCs whose money is being used in an unsustained burn) is providing "for free" are coming from somewhere: from other projects, if nothing else. In the end, everything has a cost, "there is no free lunch", yadda yadda. Regardless, point taken that as a user who only cares about that one specific feature (which I admit my arguments skewed towards), it might be the situation where a large company burning money into a pit for six years may actually cause more money to be thrown at a small problem over the lifetime of that problem than a sustainable market, and therefore we might be glad in some twisted way about that. ;P I still feel, however, that from a market-level, projects like this are bad for everyone, in the same extrinsic way that we look at people using seemingly cheap materials like styrofoam and partially-hydrogenated oils to build empires that eventually have seriously bad costs; put simply, I look at Google and VC-backed startups in the same way people look at companies polluting the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. (and yes: this is now pretty abstract, but I feel this conversation started getting to a position where the abstract-ness was fun.)
- joebadmo 15y ago
  Wow, that's actually a very interesting position, and very interesting metaphor. I'll have to think about it before I can really react, though. Unrelatedly, this thread has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for not dismissing me for the Google fanboy that I am. Also, it's kind of awesome to be conversing with you on HN. I've used your jailbreaks and software on iPod Touches before I moved to Android, and I think it's awesome work you're doing. And is there a place where you've talked about your reasons for working on iOS instead of a more open platform? I'd love to read your position on that. Thanks!
  - saurik 15y ago
    I only know of one reasonably open cell phone at the time the iPhone came out: Open Moko (these people seriously had scroll bars in their mobile UI, and their hardware was clunky, expensive, and unreliable). Some of the Palm and Windows Mobile devices had been hacked (a friend of mine managed a port of Debian to the iPaq, "Familiar"), but I do not remember any of these devices having "you are allowed to reflash us" as a feature. After the iPhone came out, I got involved with the G1 for a while. I made a few code contributions to Android; however, most of my patches, even with one of them being a possible security issue, took six months to get into AOSP... it wasn't a really open process. By the time they got back to me I had forgotten what I had learned about the things I was fixing, and never really looked back on the idea of contributing more. Additionally, the G1 wasn't actually an open hardware platform: we had to hack it. Someone figured out the "telnetd is installed and the keyboard is attached to an open root console" trick, but then the "real work" started getting a bootloader exploit; it was on a mailing list I ran (g1-hackers) where the bootloader was first dumped (possibly even on my phone, actually, although I did not do the hard part: I just did the labor; I feel like the guy who did it was named Edward). The "open" Android device, the ADP1, was expensive (you couldn't get it subsidized, only unlocked), and frankly: it was a G1... the G1 was not a good phone. If you had an iPhone, especially one you already had root access on, the Android devices at the time simply were not interesting. Since then, Android has become more open in some ways (more pieces of hardware from better manufacturers allowing you to unlock the bootloader), while more closed in others (the source code becoming more and more locked down: right now 3.x is still a closed branch; even when it opens, Google has promised longer delays between releases to AOSP). Meanwhile, Android's quality has continued to trail the iPhone: despite sometimes even having a faster CPU, the fact that it has a low quality JIT backing the entire system causes the experience of the phone to be "slow"; worse, it is incredibly laggy due to the high latency IPC that is used to interface rendering things in Java to the incoming touch events... until 3.x it didn't even have hardware accelerated UI compositing. In comparison, despite being "closed", thanks to the work of people working on jailbreaks, I have always had a playground where "the phone is mine"; and, thanks to the work that I do with MobileSubstrate and Cycript, I've never actually felt that limited by the fact that the source is closed, as I go to make modifications to things: I just do it anyway; frankly, Objective-C ARM binaries are very easy to read ;P. In fact, while looking at Android, I feel like the key problem with the people who work on hacking the ecosystem is that they have become reliant on the source code being available, which has not only led to work slamming to a halt while 3.x is behind closed doors, but also has meant a poor experience for users: people have to install entire replacement ROMs (compiled from AOSP), rather than just installing the specific modifications they want (as people do from Cydia). Finally, we can look at "what hardware would I use if I could install either operating system on the device", and the answer right now would be the iPhone 4S, and even without that device (as I have no jailbreak for it currently), the answer would be the iPhone 4: the reason is, primarily, the high resolution and high quality screen. It is for this reason that I am anxiously awaiting the Nexus Prime, which I have heard will actually have a reasonable screen: supposedly, it will be 1080p, which is even a higher resolution than that on the iPhone 4 (but watch the entire device be ludicrously larger). Unfortunately, (for what I think was probably a good reason,) its launch has been delayed for a bit; we will soon see. It will also, supposedly, not be Pentile, which makes the Nexus S that I carry around with me even worse than the Droid I had previously. However, I hear that it will still be AMOLED, which has a really really bad problem with burn-in (on my Nexus S, just a few hours at the lock screen is enough to have a noticeable shadowing where the unlock slider is; even for normal users, the status bar is up constantly). So, I guess those are my reasons: 1) history (iPhone was the first to market), 2) equality (frankly, these devices are all closed), 3) quality (the iPhone hardware and software continues to be hands down the best). That said, I am doing a lot more on Android recently, as its devices and operating system have started to become reasonable, but certainly not because I consider Android to be "open". And with that, I will leave you with a failing command (and yes, I realize that kernel.org was hacked, but Android didn't even care about finding a replacement), straight from the Android lead himself. (Note: this definition doesn't even capture the key "make install" step that Android devices are hit and miss at; and don't even get me started about how the result isn't even a complete system.) @Arubin: the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make" -- http://twitter.com/#!/Arubin/status/27808662429 http://twitter.com/#!/Arubin/status/27808662429

saurik 15y ago

I am not certain if you saw the edit I added to my previous comment (I added it reasonably immediately, but you also responded within 10 minutes, so maybe you missed it), but I believe it addresses some of these points; I will restate, however, more directly targeting this post, just in case. Google doesn't seem to try to make things sustainably, and in this case didn't even try their bread-and-butter business model (ads), possibly because to them the result would have been "chump change", whereas to a smaller company it might have been "enough to man a few bright people" (which I'd argue is enough to have something great occur). I'll add, though, that these services Google (or the VCs whose money is being used in an unsustained burn) is providing "for free" are coming from somewhere: from other projects, if nothing else. In the end, everything has a cost, "there is no free lunch", yadda yadda. Regardless, point taken that as a user who only cares about that one specific feature (which I admit my arguments skewed towards), it might be the situation where a large company burning money into a pit for six years may actually cause more money to be thrown at a small problem over the lifetime of that problem than a sustainable market, and therefore we might be glad in some twisted way about that. ;P I still feel, however, that from a market-level, projects like this are bad for everyone, in the same extrinsic way that we look at people using seemingly cheap materials like styrofoam and partially-hydrogenated oils to build empires that eventually have seriously bad costs; put simply, I look at Google and VC-backed startups in the same way people look at companies polluting the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. (and yes: this is now pretty abstract, but I feel this conversation started getting to a position where the abstract-ness was fun.)

joebadmo 15y ago
Wow, that's actually a very interesting position, and very interesting metaphor. I'll have to think about it before I can really react, though. Unrelatedly, this thread has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for not dismissing me for the Google fanboy that I am. Also, it's kind of awesome to be conversing with you on HN. I've used your jailbreaks and software on iPod Touches before I moved to Android, and I think it's awesome work you're doing. And is there a place where you've talked about your reasons for working on iOS instead of a more open platform? I'd love to read your position on that. Thanks!
- saurik 15y ago
  I only know of one reasonably open cell phone at the time the iPhone came out: Open Moko (these people seriously had scroll bars in their mobile UI, and their hardware was clunky, expensive, and unreliable). Some of the Palm and Windows Mobile devices had been hacked (a friend of mine managed a port of Debian to the iPaq, "Familiar"), but I do not remember any of these devices having "you are allowed to reflash us" as a feature. After the iPhone came out, I got involved with the G1 for a while. I made a few code contributions to Android; however, most of my patches, even with one of them being a possible security issue, took six months to get into AOSP... it wasn't a really open process. By the time they got back to me I had forgotten what I had learned about the things I was fixing, and never really looked back on the idea of contributing more. Additionally, the G1 wasn't actually an open hardware platform: we had to hack it. Someone figured out the "telnetd is installed and the keyboard is attached to an open root console" trick, but then the "real work" started getting a bootloader exploit; it was on a mailing list I ran (g1-hackers) where the bootloader was first dumped (possibly even on my phone, actually, although I did not do the hard part: I just did the labor; I feel like the guy who did it was named Edward). The "open" Android device, the ADP1, was expensive (you couldn't get it subsidized, only unlocked), and frankly: it was a G1... the G1 was not a good phone. If you had an iPhone, especially one you already had root access on, the Android devices at the time simply were not interesting. Since then, Android has become more open in some ways (more pieces of hardware from better manufacturers allowing you to unlock the bootloader), while more closed in others (the source code becoming more and more locked down: right now 3.x is still a closed branch; even when it opens, Google has promised longer delays between releases to AOSP). Meanwhile, Android's quality has continued to trail the iPhone: despite sometimes even having a faster CPU, the fact that it has a low quality JIT backing the entire system causes the experience of the phone to be "slow"; worse, it is incredibly laggy due to the high latency IPC that is used to interface rendering things in Java to the incoming touch events... until 3.x it didn't even have hardware accelerated UI compositing. In comparison, despite being "closed", thanks to the work of people working on jailbreaks, I have always had a playground where "the phone is mine"; and, thanks to the work that I do with MobileSubstrate and Cycript, I've never actually felt that limited by the fact that the source is closed, as I go to make modifications to things: I just do it anyway; frankly, Objective-C ARM binaries are very easy to read ;P. In fact, while looking at Android, I feel like the key problem with the people who work on hacking the ecosystem is that they have become reliant on the source code being available, which has not only led to work slamming to a halt while 3.x is behind closed doors, but also has meant a poor experience for users: people have to install entire replacement ROMs (compiled from AOSP), rather than just installing the specific modifications they want (as people do from Cydia). Finally, we can look at "what hardware would I use if I could install either operating system on the device", and the answer right now would be the iPhone 4S, and even without that device (as I have no jailbreak for it currently), the answer would be the iPhone 4: the reason is, primarily, the high resolution and high quality screen. It is for this reason that I am anxiously awaiting the Nexus Prime, which I have heard will actually have a reasonable screen: supposedly, it will be 1080p, which is even a higher resolution than that on the iPhone 4 (but watch the entire device be ludicrously larger). Unfortunately, (for what I think was probably a good reason,) its launch has been delayed for a bit; we will soon see. It will also, supposedly, not be Pentile, which makes the Nexus S that I carry around with me even worse than the Droid I had previously. However, I hear that it will still be AMOLED, which has a really really bad problem with burn-in (on my Nexus S, just a few hours at the lock screen is enough to have a noticeable shadowing where the unlock slider is; even for normal users, the status bar is up constantly). So, I guess those are my reasons: 1) history (iPhone was the first to market), 2) equality (frankly, these devices are all closed), 3) quality (the iPhone hardware and software continues to be hands down the best). That said, I am doing a lot more on Android recently, as its devices and operating system have started to become reasonable, but certainly not because I consider Android to be "open". And with that, I will leave you with a failing command (and yes, I realize that kernel.org was hacked, but Android didn't even care about finding a replacement), straight from the Android lead himself. (Note: this definition doesn't even capture the key "make install" step that Android devices are hit and miss at; and don't even get me started about how the result isn't even a complete system.) @Arubin: the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make" -- http://twitter.com/#!/Arubin/status/27808662429 http://twitter.com/#!/Arubin/status/27808662429