Steve Jobs on Flash: Astoundingly Hypocritical | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs on Flash: Astoundingly Hypocritical

minyanville.com

28 pointsyumraj16 comments

I don't think Jobs ever committed himself to any idealogical standard. Maybe the word you're looking for is pragmatic?

People seem to get very hung up on the word hypocrisy. The fact is that Apple is calling out Adobe on the exact same things that they themselves do, and acting like they're Jesus for it. If you don't think it's 'hypocrisy' by the letter, then that's fine, but it doesn't make their actions any less asinine.

I think that's exactly why people get hung up on it. It's not relevant. If we prove to Apple they're being hypocritical will they change their minds? Of course not. Does it matter if they were being hypocritical? Not really. Jobs could have alternatively said "life isn't fair, deal with it" and we'd be in the same spot and people would make the same conclusions. It just annoys me that someone always makes the hypocritical argument when a more substantive argument is much more effective.

People don't like hypocrites. Like it or not, the Apple brand is strongly associate with Jobs.

Even here, on HN, an Apple friendly site, many people have announced an end to their support for Apple products (or at least it's giving them some serious pause) both as consumer and as developers. Android is about to get a whole bunch of app developers purely because of this issue.

It's not about proving things to apple, it's about how other people perceive Apple.

Has everybody been using a different definition of the word than I have all this time? Criticizing others for things you do yourself is hypocritical. Period.

No, it's just that the hypocrisy here is only if you step inappropriately far back from the actual issues and squint. As with everything, the devil is in the details. If you don't favor Apple, then it's convenient to not dwell too much on those details while passing judgment.

Shame on Apple for promoting open web standards instead of healping Adobe keep the web hostage to their closed standard.

Apple is not telling Adobe, Microsoft or any other corporation to open up their platform. They are only stating that they believe web standards should be open and not controlled by a single party. And I as a user of a flash-less OS (OpenBSD) thank them and hope they win the battle for open web standards.

Open web standards are, perhaps, the only open thing Apple seriously promotes.

...and only because it serves Apple's interests for web standards to be open.

I would love for Apple to win a battle for open web standards. But that's not what they're fighting for, that's just the spin they're putting on it. They're fighting for absolute control over their market share, plain and simple. That this happens to promote open web standards is secondary to that.

How are those QT videos working out for you?

There are free quicktime implementations. The format was fully documented. Many (most?) of the codecs are a problem. Thank goodness they finally came to one that is an open standard. Of course most places ditched the quicktime wrapper at the same time so it is moot.

The missing piece, which I don't understand, is why does no one sell a cheap H.264 decoder for Linux/*BSD? There are free (beer) implementations, and the MPEG-LA suggests that the first many thousands are no royalty and after that it is something under a dollar (I didn't look that up, working from memory). So why not a business selling legally licensed but open source H.264 to the free software crowd for $3 a pop?

Can I just say that QT is the most goddamn annoying software? If it wasn't for QT Alternative, I'd swear off the whole thing. Useless shit.

Except that he's promoting H.264 which is most definitely NOT an open standard (one that Apple has a financial stake in IIRC).

Crickey... the financial press is getting in on this? Is someone's investment interests at stake, or did Apple seriously hit some kind of psychological trigger here?

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