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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

  I love this paragraph, check their hypocrisy, switch Adobe/Apple:

[Apple]'s products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from [Apple], and [Apple] has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While [Apple]'s products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by [Apple] and available only from [Apple]. By almost any definition, [Apple] is a closed system.

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Apple doesn't want to include Flash because Apple can't update Flash. Apple can't fix bugs in Flash, add new features to Flash, and so on. Apple has to rely on Adobe to fix these problems, and historically, on the Mac platform, Adobe has done a piss-poor job of it.

I'm not aware of any situation in which Apple has prevented Adobe from going about their day-to-day business with e.g. Photoshop or Illustrator, or has hindered their ability to fix bugs or add features to those products.

There is no hypocrisy here. At no point does Jobs say "proprietary software is always bad". Even the very next sentence is "Apple has many proprietary products too." This is not some dirty secret they're trying to cover up at all.

The point is that he is specifically taking about the web being open. Again: at no point does he say being proprietary or closed is inherently a bad thing. Only being so in the context of the web they consider bad. And Apple's actions in the context of the web support that.

…which is why they don't want another closed system as a layer between their products and their users.

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