Please Apple, pay all the open source projects that you use, a fair share of the revenue you generate on top of them.
Hypocrites.
I get it: I had an open source project that HP built a product around many years ago, but modulo a couple of patches from them, we saw nothing. Didn’t bother me: we knew when we open sourced it, anything that was done with it was out of our hands.
The best I’d expect from a company using open source is that they be good open source citizens and contribute back. Apple has. clang, WebKit, etc....
They benefit substantially from open source and give very little back in concrete financial terms, yet complain that Spotify is asking the same thing and portray them as freeloaders. In reality, Apple are doing far more freeloading off of other projects than Spotify is doing off of them, legal or no.
What Apple have created in the App Store (a software package repository on an OS platform) is a monopolistic trust over what should be a free marketplace, like how regular GNU/Linux package repositories have worked for decades. This is exactly what "anti-trust" is supposed to prevent and the DoJ need to have the balls to start breaking up tech companies for this shit, just like they almost did to Microsoft.
You cannot make any moral assumptions here because the whole point of many of these open-source projects is that people can use them freely, with no obligation - moral, or otherwise - to contribute back.
> should be a free marketplace, like how regular GNU/Linux package repositories have worked for decades.
Yup, this'll end beautifully. It won't devolve into a malware-ridden mess that destroys the privacy and security of users. The users that pay for a curated ecosystem and idiot-proof privacy/security.
Package repositories might be great for the HN crowd. But I think it's fairly blind to think it won't harm Apple's target audience.
I'm not making any moral assumptions. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of Apple's moral assumptions that they're making in their posting.
> It won't devolve into a malware-ridden mess that destroys the privacy and security of users.
Windows, GNU/Linux, and in fact Mac OS X itself, are all doing fine. The real security problem is elsewhere, it is disingenuous to use this as an excuse for monopolistic practises.
Apple's 'moral assumption' is that Spotify would like to 'freeload' off of their store. The App Store is provided with the intent that services which are based off of it contribute back to the App Store.
Open-source software is not provided with the 'moral assumption' that users contribute back.
There is no hypocrisy here. Apple is criticizing Spotify for trying to sidestep the moral expectations of the App Store, but Apple itself is not sidestepping moral expectations of the open-source products it uses.
> Windows and GNU/Linux are doing fine.
Are they? In what context? Do you really think Windows does "fine" for the average user, and that they are not at a huge risk of malware, terrible software, and more?
It's also disingenuous to say that security problems are not in large part caused by how open available distribution channels are. We have proof showing that the App Store has provided an objectively more secure environment for the average user than Windows or even the repository model.
No, the App Store is provided to drive iPhone sales. If you couldn't install third-party apps on iPhones, no one would buy one nowadays. The market has changed drastically since the iPhone's launch, when a public SDK was still unavailable.
> We have proof showing that the App Store has provided an objectively more secure environment for the average user than Windows or even the repository model.
I'm not convinced that's true. Apple has also invested heavily into app/process isolation on iOS itself, and a permissions model that keeps apps away from sensitive data without the user's consent.
Not to mention the fact that it's more the review process that keeps malicious apps off the phone. Google Play Store is also an app store, but they don't review apps anywhere nearly as closely.
Either way, an app store is not a prerequisite for a review process.
Have you heard of "dumping"? What Apple does in its FOSS contributions is a similar thing - pour a ton of developer resources into critical FOSS projects so that they eventually control the development process and claim they are "contributing to open source", but in the end everyone that depends on these projects have to follow the direction that they set. LLVM/Clang is perhaps one exception, but even the Apple parts of that project's history have very obvious goals of undermining GCC since they hate the GPL's guts, counterbalanced by the legitimate need for a FOSS competitor to GCC that attracts enough non-Apple influence in the LLVM/Clang project to balance out the Apple influence.
I’m sorry but the whole open source claim is weak because the musicians aren’t releasing their product as free to use by anyone. Why would you otherwise need anti piracy measures like Spotify if the music was free to use to begin with?
Apple's LLVM involvement is not driven by spite towards the GPL; Apple simply needed a compiler that was compatible with their business model. Likewise they started WebKit so as not to be dependent on MS for a browser, and Swift because they wanted a successor to aging ObjC.
Apple does not have a monopoly in any market.
Steve Jobs originally tried to keep the ObjC compiler frontend to GCC proprietary but was forced to open source it due to GPL requirements. Needless to say he hated the GPL ever since that episode and of course jumped on the opportunity to fund a competitor with a non-copyleft license.
But I'm very confused how you're twisting Apple's huge contribution toward LLVM and Webkit over the years into some evil act. Even if all you want is for GCC to be the best compiler it can be, work on LLVM has contributed to that goal by raising the bar. Predictably, GCC has gotten a lot better in the past decade or so. And I'm sure competition from LLVM has helped, just like how browser performance improved remarkably across the board when Chrome first came out. And Android's UI got way better after the iPhone was first released. (It used to be awful). Competition raises all boats; and consumers benefit when that happens.
Who exactly do you imagine is hurt by Apple's open source contributions to LLVM? If clang dethrones gcc it will be because llvm gives developers what we want - a faster compiler, faster executables, better IDE support or something else. My life is made measurably better by these things. Getting all that for free? Hallelujah.
If you don't like the direction Apple (and others) set for an opensource project you care about, you're free to build your own community around a fork. Thats what you would have to do anyway if you want a project to succeed without Apple's support.
What do you want? Great, free software? You've got it. The freedom to change that software however you want? Fork away, brave coder. The ability to sell software based on your changes? Go right ahead.
So where does that anger come from? How is anyone worse off?
I'm not twisting anything into an evil act, read my words more closely.
Some of Apple's contributions to open source have been beneficial to the rest of us, because there are competitors to keep them in check in those areas they chose to do open source in.
You should have no doubt that, had those other competitors not existed, Apple's open source contributions would have been used to push a monopolistic advantage over other projects and organisations, and passed it off as "meeting their business needs".
They do not do open source out of any principle of generosity or co-operation with other projects, and much of their ecosystem is legally and technically hostile to supporting FOSS the "proper way". For example it is impossible to properly supply a GPL binary on an iPhone because in general you do not have the ability to install arbitrarily-modified versions of it, a very fundamental principle of the standard definition of Free Open Source Software.
Also I'm not sure why you cite Android vs iPhone since near-everything about an iPhone is proprietary.
And even in the absence of competitors, how is new permissively licensed opensource software a bad thing? How, exactly do you weaponise opensourcing decent software which has no competitors? Can you give some examples?
Every Linux box that is connected to a printer (specially networked printers) runs CUPS in part by Apple.
Also, FreeBSD is a small part of macOS, contrary to what some people want other people to believe, and FreeBSD is not in that camp of GPLv3, so no, FreeBSD is not on that disgusting echo chamber leaded by Stallmann
CUPS was an independent project before Apple bought it, and we haven't exactly seen major improvements since the sale.
If Spotify was not available on the iPhone, because Apple wants to push Apple Music, I would ditch the iPhone, not Spotify.
I imagine losing Spotify wouldn't cause every Spotify user to ditch the iPhone, but I'm sure there are others like you. And many people likely have some other app that they'd consider ditching the iPhone for if it was pulled.
A healthy app ecosystem is a big part of what drives iPhone sales.