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Comment by itistoday | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else a little surprised that Jobs even got into this debate in the first place? Like, shouldn't he have had this already with some employee on the inside?

It seems to suggest that at Apple he has no opportunity to have such debates. Everyone is too scared, it's almost like he's surrounded by yes-men and is therefore astonished at the negative response he's getting. "Why can't people just understand me?" type of thing.

Here's a thought. If no one at Apple is actually standing up to Jobs, and since he seems open to outside input via email, perhaps it's a good idea to let him know how you feel? Maybe he actually doesn't get how much he's turned Apple into the 1984 Big Brother that Apple was supposed to vanquish?

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> Like, shouldn't he have had this already with some employee on the inside?

How is this e-mail chain in any way evidence that Apple has not had internal debate or that no one has the guts to disagree with Steve Jobs?

I'm not claiming it's definitive evidence, I'm just saying it seems to suggest it.

Apple has made a lot of really ethically questionable moves, and is being quite hypocritical in many cases. This is obvious to me, and others. So when someone on the outside brought this up, Steve Jobs responded in a way that almost seems like it's the first time he's having this debate. That's just my take on it.

Or do you really think that many at Apple had this same or similar kind of debate with Jobs, and then he's willing to publicly have it again with Tate? His arguments are just too weak and unpolished for it, and it's surprising he's responding to Tate at all if he's already deliberated it internally and settled on his position.

I think the willingness of a famously reclusive CEO to engage in a debate at 1 AM on a Friday night with a random, verbally aggressive blogger with whom he has no familiarity is not indicative of an executive who shies away from internal debate.

OK, so are you saying he has these kinds of debates at Apple with his fellow coworkers and then goes home and continues to have the same debates at 1AM with the rest of the world? Instead of doing... anything else?

I'm willing to believe that as a possibility. As in physically possible. You don't find that at least a little surprising though? Really?

Jobs' near terrorizing of his own employees is pretty well known. It wouldn't surprise me if he hasn't really had a long serious internal debate on this...with the answers well rehearsed and ready to go. Either he just likes endless conflict, or he's only just begun to hear these things direct.

Apple has made a lot of really ethically questionable moves...

Selling people a product that will give them cancer and telling them it makes them look cool is an ethically questionable move. Restricting the programming languages that can be used to develop for your platform is not.

I'd say it's pretty ethically questionable to harm people's livelyhoods to settle a score with an unrelated company and to then make claims that you're doing this to ensure "quality" on the platform while simultaneously demoing a quality app that violates your own rules.

Umm.. Yeah. I've come to the conclusion that this debate isn't worth participating in anymore. People don't get the bullshit Apple is pulling or are willing to look past it because of the superb quality of the iDevices and the App Store gravy train. It's hard to explain it in a paragraph. And when you explain it in detail people don't listen. You get comments like the above. You get people saying "Flash sucks" when Flash has nothing to do with it. I just don't have the time anymore, sorry. Bury away.

I'd say it's pretty ethically questionable to harm people's livelyhoods...

Livelihoods? Or shots at a quick buck for relatively little work building on the back of someone else's invention?

I hate the Facebook apps!-iPhone apps!-social games!-iPad apps! gold rushes as much as everyone else, if not more, but it can be both.

Apple doesn't legally owe gold rush developers a livelihood, but the ethics are not so clear cut, especially when they pull a Facebook-like policy switch after people have already invested.

Last I checked, the agreement that iPhone developers enter into says nothing about their rights regarding freedom of development language...in fact I think this whole fuss is about it doing the exact opposite. Nobody promised these devs anything, as far as I know. I suppose Apple could've put a warning on the sign-up page: "Warning! You're developing software for a platform that we control and may decide to alter at any point in time."

...but honestly, how many devs would've turned around and walked away if they had?

1) You read pre-OS 4.0 developer agreement. You decide it sounds reasonable. You decline the job offer from BigCorp, buy a Macbook, and code your application in MonoTouch as C# is your personally preferred programming language. You pay $100 and your application appears in the App Store.

2) Apple changes section 3.3.1 in the developer agreement for OS 4.0.

3) You have to spend the time and possibly money to learn a new language if you want your application to work on OS 4.0, or forgo your previous investment of time and money. Most iPhone OS devices will be upgraded to 4.0 relatively quickly.

Legal? Probably. Justified from Apple's point of view? Likely. Reasonable, fair or ethical? That's pretty subjective.

You decline the job offer from BigCorp

See, this right here^^^ This is the key: why did you decline the offer from BigCorp? Only two reasons I can think of...

1. You were naive and thought you could make a quick buck with less work by developing for the iPhone platform without doing it the way Apple suggested you should.

2. You had the drive to strike out and make it on your own, BigCorp be damned!

If it's #1, you only have yourself to blame. If it's #2, you're not about to let something like 3.3.1 stand in your way...

What if he'd also recruited a couple of C# programmers to build the next improved version of the same application?

Now he has to either train them too in Obj-C or recruit a new bunch of Obj-C developers.

To top it all off, he must stop improving his product and start rewriting it in Obj-C, while his competitor who started off with Obj-C doesn't have to. There was nothing in the previous version of the OS agreement to suggest that cross-compilation would somehow be banned in future versions. All because Steve Jobs, loves Obj-C. Now how isn't that screwing people's livelihood?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but pre-OS 4.0 the agreement did not say anything about which languages you should be using. Xcode might have been the only officially supported IDE, but that's about it. You could say one shouldn't have trusted Apple not to screw others over, but that doesn't really help the ethics argument at hand here.

Take out the job offer from bigcorp from my example. You're still going to have to invest in hardware and probably ramp-up.

> People don't get the bullshit Apple is pulling.

We absolutely do. You won't find a more ardent opponent of 3.3.1 than me. But that doesn't mean I accuse every person underneath Steve Jobs of kowtowing to his every whim without a whiff of disagreement, or claim that Jobs doesn't permit dissent based on absolutely zero evidence. I can disagree with and express opposition to a particular action of Apple's without making it into a personal vendetta.

I don't recall doing any of that, sorry if my comments made that impression.

It's okay, as this thread is showing, you can always get all your karma back by just posting a statement about how you wish Jobs was your dad and how he really showed some blogger what for in an unnecessary back and forth that ended with him belittling the blogger for not being a billionaire.

No, you are really reaching. He replies to a lot of user email, seemingly at random. Years ago a friend of mine in a completely unrelated industry used to exchange email with him about odd things that happened in the Santa Cruz mountains.

I never said it was surprising that he replies to emails.

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