6 ms·

Competition vs. Community

140 points by superchink 12y ago

sophiebits 12y ago
> Many of the things I obsess over no one actually truly [...] understands (the font metric calculation logic in Cydia's CSS). This sounds fascinating; I'd love to know more about it.
- saurik 12y ago
  I've wanted to write a detailed blog post about the problem I needed to solve and what I ended up doing; the fact that you have said this just increased the likelihood of me doing that "soon" quite drastically.
  - keehun 12y ago
    Anything with "font" and "calculation" is exciting (really!)
  - girvo 12y ago
    I'd like to sign my name to wanting to see it, too!
  - wingerlang 12y ago
    I would read a blog full of obscure/behind the scenes details/problems people face and solve.
    - keehun 12y ago
      I wonder if a tumblr dedicated to post-mortems, tech crisis prevention, clever programming solutions, et al. would be popular (or already existing)
twodayslate 12y ago
> Part of the issue is that payment processing is a brutal and painful battle. Bitcoins might be a viable and less painful option
- olefoo 12y ago
  Not really. You have to factor in the cognitive load of dealing with bitcoin and all that it entails, currency risk, regulatory headaches, banks and other financial institutions reacting negatively to your bitcoin exposure; not to mention the not inconsiderable security exposure you have to manage of having a valuable string of bits that must be secured and backed up and guarded from exposure. Bitcoin is not cost-free, and right at the moment, it represents more risk than most legitimate businesses are willing to assume. This is not to say that bitcoin doesn't have benefits, it certainly does; but those benefits don't come for free.
- jychang 12y ago
  Bitcoin-only payments drives away inexperienced users. A larger percentage of a much smaller pie... isn't a good thing, considering how small the "jailbroken paid apps" pie is right now.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  For the merchant? Sure. For the customer? Not at all.
dkhar 12y ago
Man, saurik, you need a vacation. You need to not have to think about Cydia, or the community, or maybe even computers at all for at least a week or so. You're talking about how all of these developments in the community wear on you, and how you view maintaining all this stuff in part as an obligation. I could be reading all this wrong, but I get the impression that dedicating so much of your life to Cydia is going to burn you out eventually, abrasive community or not. You just sound tired. I feel like letting the project sit for a week or so while you take a break and get away from it all may actually be worth it in the long run. You sure as hell deserve it.
- tfb 12y ago
  > You sure as hell deserve it. Without a doubt. I've spent countless hours myself developing a mod for an old gaming community with some of the most unappreciative manchildren (trolls) in existence, and I saw it through to the end because I felt I had an obligation to finish it. And to this day, there are a handful of people from a subset of that community who blame me for the demise of said subset, even though I did everything they asked. I learned a lot from it though, and not just about coding and development, but about communities in general. The entitlement that some people feel they have of your time can be astounding. Apparently when you do things for people for free out kindness or out of passion for something, it only leads some (many?) of them to expect you to continue to do it all, until they've sucked every bit out of you that they can. I'm sure this is especially worse in online communities, because to them, you're just text on their screen who provides them with something fun or useful, not a human being. So yeah. Take a break. A week may not even be long enough. Work on other things, completely unrelated things. It'll give you a fresh perspective and help with realizing exactly how much time and energy of your life you're devoting towards something and how much of it is really worth it.
  - tonyedgecombe 12y ago
    Over the years I've found the more I charge the less grief I get.
pugz 12y ago
I got to the end of that article and thought "boy, I've really benefitted from the work Jay has done. I should send him some lunch money as a thank you" and there was the link right at the top of the page! I sent you $20 for all the work you've done to teach me more about the inner workings of iOS, even if I have never installed Cydia. :)
christiangenco 12y ago
> The reality is that Apple makes money because Apple sells hardware: they make more money on a single iPhone than they could ever hope to win back in a lifetime of application sales, and most users purchase a new iPhone every two years. You'd have to buy hundreds of $1-$2 apps every year for Apple to care about that business. Is this true? I was under the impression that Apple makes the majority of their iOS money from royalties on the app store. What on earth could their expenses be to offset 30% of $1,000,000,000/quarter[1]? 1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2014/01/07/apples-app-store-could-have-generated-1-billion-in-revenue-in-the-december-quarter/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2014/01/07/apples-app...
- saurik 12y ago
  If we look at Apple's 10-Q for Q1 2014, we see ~$40b in revenue for iOS devices, and ~$10b in revenue for "iTunes, Software and Services", which "includes revenue from sales on the iTunes Store, the App Store, the Mac App Store, and the iBooks Store, and revenue from sales of AppleCare, licensing and other services". http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-14-157311&CIK=320193 http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-14-... Conservative high estimates of their profit margin on iTunes sales is 10% (often the more reasonable estimates are "low single digits"), the low-end estimates I've seen for hardware sales is 40% (you can find people who have done detailed charts, breaking down the parts and labor for building these devices). While Apple has said little historically about individual product profitability, the patent lawsuit between the company and Samsung provided one small window into just how valuable the iPhone franchise has been. In just 18 months between October 2010 and March 2012, gross margins on iPhone were between 49 and 58%, an almost unheard of figure for a consumer electronics product. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/09/11/marginal-cost-and-benefit-apples-addiction-to-iphone-profits/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/09/11/marginal... That's $16b profit on hardware, and $1b profit for all of iTunes (which analysts have claimed is likely similar for all of their various subdivisions); which, even if we took the crazy conservative assumption that that money is almost entirely revenue from the iTunes App Store, is only ~5% of their income. But, as I bet is true for most of the people you know, I spend way more money on movies and music than I do on apps. Sure, there are "whales" who buy tons of in-app purchases, but "whales" for music are also common, and the cost of a single season of a television show is a massive investment. Many (not all, maybe not even most, but many) of the people I know also purchase AppleCare, which is $100 per device and allocated to the same revenue bucket. I think this also includes AppleCare for MacBooks, which is $250. The percentage is thereby certainly much much lower than 5%. You can also look at this in the other direction: the iPhone costs ~$600 (you don't pay all of this to Apple, though, it being subsidized through payments to your carrier), with the income estimates being ~$250. To make Apple as much money as they make on a single iPhone sale you would have to buy 2,500 $1 apps ;P. At that point, Peter Oppenheimer added, “We run the App Store just a little over breakeven,” implicitly making the case that the App Store was not a big profit generator for the company. http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_app_store_runs_just_above_break_even http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_app_store_runs_... If we add the content margins from music and apps and assume the store runs at break even we can get an idea of what it costs to operate the store. The latest number is $113 million per month (from a total income of $313 million/mo.). It implies over $1.3 billion per year. Much of that cost does go into serving the content (traffic and payment processing). Some of it goes to curation and support. But it’s very likely that there is much left over to be invested in capacity increases. http://www.asymco.com/2011/06/13/itunes-now-costs-1-3-billionyr-to-run/ http://www.asymco.com/2011/06/13/itunes-now-costs-1-3-billio... (One thing to note is that the amount of money they make off this division has changed over time, and people are now sometimes reporting the division to be profitable and no longer mostly be running "break even". However, these reports cite the reason being that Apple's margins on first-party software has increased and is in the same pile.) For this reason, management has begun since 2010 to suggest that at least the App Store is run “a little over break-even”. How little is a good question. A one percent operating margin (from gross revenues) would imply as much as $45 million margin. I estimate 2% is possible on Apps and 1% on Music. My estimate is that Apple’s own software generated $3.6 billion in Revenues in 2012. As you can imagine, this is a high margin business which grows at nearly 20%/yr. Although I estimate that the software business has been overtaken by the Apps and Music businesses in gross revenues, it keeps an operating margin similar to that of Microsoft or about 50%. This means that iTunes inclusive of Apple’s own Software generates as much as 15% operating margin on gross revenues. That’s over $2 billion a year. So much for breaking even. http://www.asymco.com/2013/03/22/so-long-break-even/ http://www.asymco.com/2013/03/22/so-long-break-even/
jychang 12y ago
I've always wondered what the term "Cydia" meant, so I hope Saurik can clarify: "Cydia" the app, or "Cydia" the ecosystem? The app itself, more or less, is a graphical frontend for APT on the iphone. On the other hand, a lot of applications and stuff that comes with "Cydia the app" that form the ecosystem- like MobileSubstrate, Cyscript, etc mentioned in the article. I remember back in the "wild west" days of jailbreaking, where a jailbreak implied literally just that- the ability to run unsigned code on iOS. The jailbreak (redsn0w, I think) around the iOS 3 days didn't even come with Cydia- it just installed SSH, and the user had to install Cydia after SSHing into the device. I remember enjoying the Telesphoro repo just for the *nix frontend apps that it installed, the coreutils, netutils, vim, etc packages. I originally didn't jailbreak for Cydia/substrate/whatever, I jailbroke to use my iphone as a nix workstation; admittedly this is a extreme minority use. I wonder if Saurik could separate the app and the ecosystem of packages. Is it even possible? I don't claim to understand how Cydia works now, but is it possible to split off the maintenance of the Cydia app and the core (jailbreak/cydia) ecosystem packages like MobileSubstrate?
- saurik 12y ago
  > The jailbreak (redsn0w, I think) around the iOS 3 days didn't even come with Cydia- it just installed SSH, and the user had to install Cydia after SSHing into the device. Very few versions of redsn0w ever installed just SSH (the ones that did were beta versions targeting iOS firmware versions where we didn't want to make things easy for end users). Cydia was included by default with the initial release of PwnageTool for iOS 2, and has been included in almost every jailbreak ever since. > I've always wondered what the term "Cydia" meant, so I hope Saurik can clarify: "Cydia" the app, or "Cydia" the ecosystem? You use the term MobileSubstrate, which was the name of a dylib and the low-level name of a developer-only package for what was always called Cydia Substrate (the very first source code file for it I wrote in 2008 had Cydia Substrate at the top). Apple named most of their folders and files and bundle names at the time like that. Cydia is a platform for runtime code modification that includes an SDK for making modifications (Substrate), a distribution system for installing them (Installer), a payment processing, licensing, and accounting backend (Store), and (on Android only, currently, and not really fleshed out yet) a USB device management tool (Impactor). The icon for Cydia Installer is labeled "Cydia", so the boundaries between the terms "Cydia"-the-app and "Cydia"-the-platform is blurry. People then tend to talk about "Cydia Repositories" (APT repositories with content for usage with Cydia) and "Cydia extensions/apps" (what I normally call "Substrate extensions"). As for the "ecosystem", the line is often blurred here between the "iOS jailbreak ecosystem" and the "Cydia ecosystem" because almost every jailbreak tool has included Cydia Installer, Cydia Installer is the only way to get Cydia Substrate, and almost everything in the ecosystem is built as a Substrate extension of some form. > I wonder if Saurik could separate the app and the ecosystem of packages. As explained in the article, I am able to maintain all the things I'm responsible for, as well as have the time to help all the people who maintain all the things I'm not directly responsible for, because I have a semi-profitable business that I have managed to build out of the Installer and Store parts of the Cydia platform. Alternatively, I could charge developers for licenses to use Substrate, and I could sell Cycript as some kind of stand-alone tool package, but that would have a massively stifling effect on the developer ecosystem. It isn't about "these things are overly coupled", it is "these things are effectively coupled but don't look to be". Another option is that I could build first-party software for the device built out of Substrate, and distribute my software via someone else's software distribution and payments service. This sounds like an even worse scenario. In this case, I would be highly incentivized to hoard Substrate for only my products as a competitive advantage. Essentially, if someone wants to compete with me on Installer/Store, they need to be prepared to handle everything else, because that's the place where I am able to make money: if they want the only part that's profitable they had better be prepared to take on all the things that aren't, as they aren't entitled to my effort. Like, I don't know what you are hoping to obtain by splitting Substrate and Installer/Store apart, but if the goal is to be able to let people compete with some of the things I've built without just replacing me entirely, that isn't really possible and I honestly don't see the point: I would just leave if that happened.
MarcusVorenus 12y ago
If there is a program that sucks and the maintainer is unwilling to merge your changes that (according to you) make it better, then what choice do you have but to compete? Or are you willing to just let it be and try to live with the shitty program? Competition is not a choice, you can't just say "please don't compete with me because I'm not motivated by it" and hope it will work. Competition is just something that you have to do if you want your idea of what is right to remain at the top of the ladder.
sharemywin 12y ago
I think you are always going to have people/groups your going to compete with and ones you cooporate with. You chose to compete with iOS by creating an alternative(jailbreaking). I agree trying to compete on minor changes seems like a pretty big waste of time, but your probably not going to get much value out of them as part of your community anyways. I guess it comes down to movitivation. If people are competing mostly because of ego or is there a deeper reason that will resonate with others.

140 points by superchink 12y ago

> Many of the things I obsess over no one actually truly [...] understands (the font metric calculation logic in Cydia's CSS). This sounds fascinating; I'd love to know more about it.

saurik 12y ago
I've wanted to write a detailed blog post about the problem I needed to solve and what I ended up doing; the fact that you have said this just increased the likelihood of me doing that "soon" quite drastically.
- keehun 12y ago
  Anything with "font" and "calculation" is exciting (really!)
- girvo 12y ago
  I'd like to sign my name to wanting to see it, too!
- wingerlang 12y ago
  I would read a blog full of obscure/behind the scenes details/problems people face and solve.
  - keehun 12y ago
    I wonder if a tumblr dedicated to post-mortems, tech crisis prevention, clever programming solutions, et al. would be popular (or already existing)

twodayslate 12y ago

> Part of the issue is that payment processing is a brutal and painful battle. Bitcoins might be a viable and less painful option

olefoo 12y ago
Not really. You have to factor in the cognitive load of dealing with bitcoin and all that it entails, currency risk, regulatory headaches, banks and other financial institutions reacting negatively to your bitcoin exposure; not to mention the not inconsiderable security exposure you have to manage of having a valuable string of bits that must be secured and backed up and guarded from exposure. Bitcoin is not cost-free, and right at the moment, it represents more risk than most legitimate businesses are willing to assume. This is not to say that bitcoin doesn't have benefits, it certainly does; but those benefits don't come for free.
jychang 12y ago
Bitcoin-only payments drives away inexperienced users. A larger percentage of a much smaller pie... isn't a good thing, considering how small the "jailbroken paid apps" pie is right now.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
For the merchant? Sure. For the customer? Not at all.

dkhar 12y ago

Man, saurik, you need a vacation. You need to not have to think about Cydia, or the community, or maybe even computers at all for at least a week or so. You're talking about how all of these developments in the community wear on you, and how you view maintaining all this stuff in part as an obligation. I could be reading all this wrong, but I get the impression that dedicating so much of your life to Cydia is going to burn you out eventually, abrasive community or not. You just sound tired. I feel like letting the project sit for a week or so while you take a break and get away from it all may actually be worth it in the long run. You sure as hell deserve it.

tfb 12y ago
> You sure as hell deserve it. Without a doubt. I've spent countless hours myself developing a mod for an old gaming community with some of the most unappreciative manchildren (trolls) in existence, and I saw it through to the end because I felt I had an obligation to finish it. And to this day, there are a handful of people from a subset of that community who blame me for the demise of said subset, even though I did everything they asked. I learned a lot from it though, and not just about coding and development, but about communities in general. The entitlement that some people feel they have of your time can be astounding. Apparently when you do things for people for free out kindness or out of passion for something, it only leads some (many?) of them to expect you to continue to do it all, until they've sucked every bit out of you that they can. I'm sure this is especially worse in online communities, because to them, you're just text on their screen who provides them with something fun or useful, not a human being. So yeah. Take a break. A week may not even be long enough. Work on other things, completely unrelated things. It'll give you a fresh perspective and help with realizing exactly how much time and energy of your life you're devoting towards something and how much of it is really worth it.
- tonyedgecombe 12y ago
  Over the years I've found the more I charge the less grief I get.

pugz 12y ago

I got to the end of that article and thought "boy, I've really benefitted from the work Jay has done. I should send him some lunch money as a thank you" and there was the link right at the top of the page! I sent you $20 for all the work you've done to teach me more about the inner workings of iOS, even if I have never installed Cydia. :)

christiangenco 12y ago

> The reality is that Apple makes money because Apple sells hardware: they make more money on a single iPhone than they could ever hope to win back in a lifetime of application sales, and most users purchase a new iPhone every two years. You'd have to buy hundreds of $1-$2 apps every year for Apple to care about that business. Is this true? I was under the impression that Apple makes the majority of their iOS money from royalties on the app store. What on earth could their expenses be to offset 30% of $1,000,000,000/quarter[1]? 1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2014/01/07/apples-app-store-could-have-generated-1-billion-in-revenue-in-the-december-quarter/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2014/01/07/apples-app...

saurik 12y ago
If we look at Apple's 10-Q for Q1 2014, we see ~$40b in revenue for iOS devices, and ~$10b in revenue for "iTunes, Software and Services", which "includes revenue from sales on the iTunes Store, the App Store, the Mac App Store, and the iBooks Store, and revenue from sales of AppleCare, licensing and other services". http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-14-157311&CIK=320193 http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-14-... Conservative high estimates of their profit margin on iTunes sales is 10% (often the more reasonable estimates are "low single digits"), the low-end estimates I've seen for hardware sales is 40% (you can find people who have done detailed charts, breaking down the parts and labor for building these devices). While Apple has said little historically about individual product profitability, the patent lawsuit between the company and Samsung provided one small window into just how valuable the iPhone franchise has been. In just 18 months between October 2010 and March 2012, gross margins on iPhone were between 49 and 58%, an almost unheard of figure for a consumer electronics product. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/09/11/marginal-cost-and-benefit-apples-addiction-to-iphone-profits/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/09/11/marginal... That's $16b profit on hardware, and $1b profit for all of iTunes (which analysts have claimed is likely similar for all of their various subdivisions); which, even if we took the crazy conservative assumption that that money is almost entirely revenue from the iTunes App Store, is only ~5% of their income. But, as I bet is true for most of the people you know, I spend way more money on movies and music than I do on apps. Sure, there are "whales" who buy tons of in-app purchases, but "whales" for music are also common, and the cost of a single season of a television show is a massive investment. Many (not all, maybe not even most, but many) of the people I know also purchase AppleCare, which is $100 per device and allocated to the same revenue bucket. I think this also includes AppleCare for MacBooks, which is $250. The percentage is thereby certainly much much lower than 5%. You can also look at this in the other direction: the iPhone costs ~$600 (you don't pay all of this to Apple, though, it being subsidized through payments to your carrier), with the income estimates being ~$250. To make Apple as much money as they make on a single iPhone sale you would have to buy 2,500 $1 apps ;P. At that point, Peter Oppenheimer added, “We run the App Store just a little over breakeven,” implicitly making the case that the App Store was not a big profit generator for the company. http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_app_store_runs_just_above_break_even http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_app_store_runs_... If we add the content margins from music and apps and assume the store runs at break even we can get an idea of what it costs to operate the store. The latest number is $113 million per month (from a total income of $313 million/mo.). It implies over $1.3 billion per year. Much of that cost does go into serving the content (traffic and payment processing). Some of it goes to curation and support. But it’s very likely that there is much left over to be invested in capacity increases. http://www.asymco.com/2011/06/13/itunes-now-costs-1-3-billionyr-to-run/ http://www.asymco.com/2011/06/13/itunes-now-costs-1-3-billio... (One thing to note is that the amount of money they make off this division has changed over time, and people are now sometimes reporting the division to be profitable and no longer mostly be running "break even". However, these reports cite the reason being that Apple's margins on first-party software has increased and is in the same pile.) For this reason, management has begun since 2010 to suggest that at least the App Store is run “a little over break-even”. How little is a good question. A one percent operating margin (from gross revenues) would imply as much as $45 million margin. I estimate 2% is possible on Apps and 1% on Music. My estimate is that Apple’s own software generated $3.6 billion in Revenues in 2012. As you can imagine, this is a high margin business which grows at nearly 20%/yr. Although I estimate that the software business has been overtaken by the Apps and Music businesses in gross revenues, it keeps an operating margin similar to that of Microsoft or about 50%. This means that iTunes inclusive of Apple’s own Software generates as much as 15% operating margin on gross revenues. That’s over $2 billion a year. So much for breaking even. http://www.asymco.com/2013/03/22/so-long-break-even/ http://www.asymco.com/2013/03/22/so-long-break-even/

jychang 12y ago

I've always wondered what the term "Cydia" meant, so I hope Saurik can clarify: "Cydia" the app, or "Cydia" the ecosystem? The app itself, more or less, is a graphical frontend for APT on the iphone. On the other hand, a lot of applications and stuff that comes with "Cydia the app" that form the ecosystem- like MobileSubstrate, Cyscript, etc mentioned in the article. I remember back in the "wild west" days of jailbreaking, where a jailbreak implied literally just that- the ability to run unsigned code on iOS. The jailbreak (redsn0w, I think) around the iOS 3 days didn't even come with Cydia- it just installed SSH, and the user had to install Cydia after SSHing into the device. I remember enjoying the Telesphoro repo just for the *nix frontend apps that it installed, the coreutils, netutils, vim, etc packages. I originally didn't jailbreak for Cydia/substrate/whatever, I jailbroke to use my iphone as a nix workstation; admittedly this is a extreme minority use. I wonder if Saurik could separate the app and the ecosystem of packages. Is it even possible? I don't claim to understand how Cydia works now, but is it possible to split off the maintenance of the Cydia app and the core (jailbreak/cydia) ecosystem packages like MobileSubstrate?

saurik 12y ago
> The jailbreak (redsn0w, I think) around the iOS 3 days didn't even come with Cydia- it just installed SSH, and the user had to install Cydia after SSHing into the device. Very few versions of redsn0w ever installed just SSH (the ones that did were beta versions targeting iOS firmware versions where we didn't want to make things easy for end users). Cydia was included by default with the initial release of PwnageTool for iOS 2, and has been included in almost every jailbreak ever since. > I've always wondered what the term "Cydia" meant, so I hope Saurik can clarify: "Cydia" the app, or "Cydia" the ecosystem? You use the term MobileSubstrate, which was the name of a dylib and the low-level name of a developer-only package for what was always called Cydia Substrate (the very first source code file for it I wrote in 2008 had Cydia Substrate at the top). Apple named most of their folders and files and bundle names at the time like that. Cydia is a platform for runtime code modification that includes an SDK for making modifications (Substrate), a distribution system for installing them (Installer), a payment processing, licensing, and accounting backend (Store), and (on Android only, currently, and not really fleshed out yet) a USB device management tool (Impactor). The icon for Cydia Installer is labeled "Cydia", so the boundaries between the terms "Cydia"-the-app and "Cydia"-the-platform is blurry. People then tend to talk about "Cydia Repositories" (APT repositories with content for usage with Cydia) and "Cydia extensions/apps" (what I normally call "Substrate extensions"). As for the "ecosystem", the line is often blurred here between the "iOS jailbreak ecosystem" and the "Cydia ecosystem" because almost every jailbreak tool has included Cydia Installer, Cydia Installer is the only way to get Cydia Substrate, and almost everything in the ecosystem is built as a Substrate extension of some form. > I wonder if Saurik could separate the app and the ecosystem of packages. As explained in the article, I am able to maintain all the things I'm responsible for, as well as have the time to help all the people who maintain all the things I'm not directly responsible for, because I have a semi-profitable business that I have managed to build out of the Installer and Store parts of the Cydia platform. Alternatively, I could charge developers for licenses to use Substrate, and I could sell Cycript as some kind of stand-alone tool package, but that would have a massively stifling effect on the developer ecosystem. It isn't about "these things are overly coupled", it is "these things are effectively coupled but don't look to be". Another option is that I could build first-party software for the device built out of Substrate, and distribute my software via someone else's software distribution and payments service. This sounds like an even worse scenario. In this case, I would be highly incentivized to hoard Substrate for only my products as a competitive advantage. Essentially, if someone wants to compete with me on Installer/Store, they need to be prepared to handle everything else, because that's the place where I am able to make money: if they want the only part that's profitable they had better be prepared to take on all the things that aren't, as they aren't entitled to my effort. Like, I don't know what you are hoping to obtain by splitting Substrate and Installer/Store apart, but if the goal is to be able to let people compete with some of the things I've built without just replacing me entirely, that isn't really possible and I honestly don't see the point: I would just leave if that happened.

MarcusVorenus 12y ago

If there is a program that sucks and the maintainer is unwilling to merge your changes that (according to you) make it better, then what choice do you have but to compete? Or are you willing to just let it be and try to live with the shitty program? Competition is not a choice, you can't just say "please don't compete with me because I'm not motivated by it" and hope it will work. Competition is just something that you have to do if you want your idea of what is right to remain at the top of the ladder.

sharemywin 12y ago

I think you are always going to have people/groups your going to compete with and ones you cooporate with. You chose to compete with iOS by creating an alternative(jailbreaking). I agree trying to compete on minor changes seems like a pretty big waste of time, but your probably not going to get much value out of them as part of your community anyways. I guess it comes down to movitivation. If people are competing mostly because of ego or is there a deeper reason that will resonate with others.