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"Closed, locked, walled garden, proprietary, owned by carriers (false - android is restricted by carriers, not iOS)", etc. And yet strangely, I use open source

"Closed, locked, walled garden, proprietary, owned by carriers (false - android is restricted by carriers, not iOS)", etc. And yet strangely, I use open source libraries on iOS all the time. Open source is completely and utterly irrelevant to end-users. It is only meaningful if you are able to work with the source code. The only thing stopping you from doing that is not wanting to pay the $100 developer registration.

alextingle 13y ago
> Open source is completely and utterly irrelevant to end-users. That is arrant nonsense. I am an end user - free software is important to me not because I want to fiddle around with the source code today, but because I may well need to have access to the source tomorrow. Yes I am a programmer, but that's a lot less relevant than you seem to think. I'm not an iOS or Android developer - I'm sure I could learn those skill if I needed to, but I can always hire someone to do it for me... and of course that option is available to any user of the software, not just programmers. To imagine that software freedom is about programmers satisfying their curiosity, or fiddling with their phone's UI is to miss the point entirely. It's about control. It's about my ability to control the device that I've bought, and the software that I choose to use on it. It's about me being able to get a new feature that I really need. It's about nobody being able to take away software that I've come to depend upon for my livelihood. The problem with Apple's $100 per year is not the money. The problem is Apple's ability to take away my freedom to modify my device as I see fit.
- engrenage 13y ago
  Non-programmers don't think like this. They don't falsely imagine that they have the ability to modify the device 'as they see fit' in the first place. To do that, you'd have to do more than just 'hire a programmer'. If you really have the resources to do that, then nobody, not even Apple, is stopping you from hiring a team.
  - alextingle 13y ago
    > If you really have the resources to do that, then nobody, not even Apple, is stopping you from hiring a team. That's the crux of the matter though. Apple can stop me from hiring a team. They can do anything they like, because they have retained ultimate control over my [1] device, even after purporting to sell it to me. [1] - "My device" is only rhetorical of course - I don't actually own any iOS devices for reasons that should be obvious by now.
    - engrenage 13y ago
      So the first part is simply false. You're legally entitled to install whatever you like on your iPhone. Apple doesn't owe you the work to make that easy and they have not. Go ahead - hire your team. But really, if you have the resources to hire a team to build a Mobile OS, why wouldn't you just commission hardware from someone else, rather than running it on iPhones?

alextingle 13y ago

> Open source is completely and utterly irrelevant to end-users. That is arrant nonsense. I am an end user - free software is important to me not because I want to fiddle around with the source code today, but because I may well need to have access to the source tomorrow. Yes I am a programmer, but that's a lot less relevant than you seem to think. I'm not an iOS or Android developer - I'm sure I could learn those skill if I needed to, but I can always hire someone to do it for me... and of course that option is available to any user of the software, not just programmers. To imagine that software freedom is about programmers satisfying their curiosity, or fiddling with their phone's UI is to miss the point entirely. It's about control. It's about my ability to control the device that I've bought, and the software that I choose to use on it. It's about me being able to get a new feature that I really need. It's about nobody being able to take away software that I've come to depend upon for my livelihood. The problem with Apple's $100 per year is not the money. The problem is Apple's ability to take away my freedom to modify my device as I see fit.

engrenage 13y ago
Non-programmers don't think like this. They don't falsely imagine that they have the ability to modify the device 'as they see fit' in the first place. To do that, you'd have to do more than just 'hire a programmer'. If you really have the resources to do that, then nobody, not even Apple, is stopping you from hiring a team.
- alextingle 13y ago
  > If you really have the resources to do that, then nobody, not even Apple, is stopping you from hiring a team. That's the crux of the matter though. Apple can stop me from hiring a team. They can do anything they like, because they have retained ultimate control over my [1] device, even after purporting to sell it to me. [1] - "My device" is only rhetorical of course - I don't actually own any iOS devices for reasons that should be obvious by now.
  - engrenage 13y ago
    So the first part is simply false. You're legally entitled to install whatever you like on your iPhone. Apple doesn't owe you the work to make that easy and they have not. Go ahead - hire your team. But really, if you have the resources to hire a team to build a Mobile OS, why wouldn't you just commission hardware from someone else, rather than running it on iPhones?