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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

That's what I've heard about UEFI, TPM and Windows Vista too, yet people are happily building their own PCs and merrily running all kinds of software and operating systems on them. Others are buying heavily locked down iDevices [1] and are happy with them too. ´

People that want openness and the freedom to tinker with their own devices will always find a way to do so, moving away from systems that inhibit their efforts (or just breaking them open, getting people interested in reverse engineering, an invaluable skill even as an open source developer). Others that don't care will continue to not care and buy the system that best fits their needs.

I think it's almost an egocentric worldview to demand that everybody use an open system even if they have no desire to make use of that openness whatsoever at best, and see it as a security/complexity risk at worst.

[1] By the way, both iOS and Android can run a full Linux userspace today!

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The only problem is that from a political perspective you have given away all of your power for convenience which is not a problem in say a country like the US until someone comes into power who does not like you or the people you associate with. So yes as long as things are going well security is better taken care of, etc. but when things are not going well for you then all your bases belong to them... like imagine China for instance. So if you had the foresight to build you own bases and your political system goes to shit, you still have the right to carry on with your life whereas in other cases you could be sent off to some place you rather not be sent off to and your life destroyed because the political system and/or company does not like you. And such change is swift, damaging, and isolating as the majority will usually fall in line or not have done anything enough to warrant any attention -- i.e. like as in your average Chinese citizen... but a minority will have and then will be persecuted and have their lives destroyed as a result. Say Hong Kong opposition.

I don’t see what a political perspective provides here. It’s not like you don’t have a choice in consumer tech, unless there are strong networking affects play.

So far, but how far... you should ask yourself. Businesses make decision in light of the current reality. So far Microsoft has had to deal with devs using open source stack on Mac due to things like Homebrew, forcing them to incorporate a whole Linux distro into their OS to keep devs there. So as long as you can keep open source going, you can hold the gates. But question is how long... indefinitely? As the market grows there is room but when the market shrinks and has maturity how much room will be left. And general network effects of the cloud are already felt all over the place, like a document produced on a pc hardly ever stays on the PC it ends up on Google Mail, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, etc. There is no privacy and basically at this point is a joke.

But there are strong network effects. The more people who use a platform, the more apps there are and vice versa.

Other people not caring about openness is like littering. Even if it helps you a little (you don't have to trade against any of the things Apple forces you to trade against), it's a huge problem when everybody does it.

I'm sorry, but all your bases are belong to (us) them. You can't forget the ungrammatical `are'. ;)

> By the way, both iOS and Android can run a full Linux userspace today!

In Apple's eyes, that's a bug, not a feature.

There's a Linux emulator available in the App Store. This seems like a pretty explicit endorsement.

> iOS [...] can run a full Linux userspace today!

Presumably you mean iPhones/iPad/etc hardware rather than the iOS operating system? Although I guess there are VM tools for iOS now?

iSH[1,2] is an example of such a tool. It emulates an x86 Linux userspace on top of iOS.

[1] https://ish.app/ [2] https://github.com/ish-app/ish

Sounds recklessly optimistic. "I don't care if open platforms go from 5% to 0.1% market share - I am confident manufacturers will keep serving me. Also market share is the purest expression of democratic will, questioning that Apple users want to be prevented from running non-Apple-approved software is egocentric. As is worrying about adverse effects of a world where 90%+ of the population have surrendered control of their computers to a handful of giant corporations."

Who cares if those corporations could (can?) kill any software company by blocking their products. Or news company, for that matter:

"[Apple] has been forced to remove several apps from the App Store in China, including the New York Times and Quartz news apps." - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-07/apple-tv-...

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