> I was replying to the examples of Twitter and Reddit you gave. AIM, MSN and ICQ weren’t amongst your examples, Yes they were > So now we’re going from one f

> I was replying to the examples of Twitter and Reddit you gave. AIM, MSN and ICQ weren’t amongst your examples, Yes they were > So now we’re going from one false equivalency to another? Perhaps it helps if I break it down. The players on the board are: [...] Pidgin [etc] I'm not talking about FOSS when I say "There’s been plenty of 3rd party clients for Twitter and Reddit that weren’t free." Apollo is a great example of a paid 3rd party app that HN were sympathetic to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36312122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36312122 > I guess I misread what you were going for. I feel the opposite. Granted I haven’t looked into this, and perhaps this is because repos are more readily accessible than ever, but I have the feeling there’s more open source stuff available than ever before. I agree there is. And commercial operating systems are taking advantage of that too. Yet our walled gardens are more restrictive than ever. Messaging protocols are more locked down than ever (libpurple is a pale shell of what it used to be, Facebook and Google used to use XMPP). There's ongoing legal disputes about Apple's App Store and how restrictive that is. Windows and macOS both treat any unsigned 3rd party programs as suspicious. Our hardware itself is become more locked down than ever too. It's a better story on desktop Linux for sure. But I'm stuck with Android and iOS for phones because building a FOSS handset is almost impossible (and I've tried!). Even the hardware on modern phones are full of closed binary firmware, SoCs and closed Linux drivers. But I digress. My original complaint was the, in my view, double standard happening about people shouting for greater openness yet also supporting Apple in locking out 3rd party iMessage clients. > Personally I thought it was a pretty cool little workaround they bought (pypush), but didn’t think it was smart of them to try and sell it. > As illogical it might sounds, if this was just a DIY thing for people to do themselves then I would’ve probably leaned more towards Apple being petty by trying to block it. But by it being a company doing it and trying to profit off of it, I immediately skewed more against Beeper. > In particular because I saw the writing on the wall. Not only of Apple mitigating it, but the subsequent “woe is me” by Beeper as well. Whereas I’m more of the mentality that if you’re gonna fuck around like this, at least take it on the chin if it doesn’t work out. Yeah I completely agree with you regarding Beeper. That said, I don't think that should really change things on Apple's side. It just means both parties are at fault rather than it being a hero vs villain story. I guess I just view this debacle as more nuanced than a lot of the comments on here would like to claim. People are definitely picking sides but, personally, I don't think either company has come out of this looking particularly great.