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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

Blink doesn't have a lifetime license, which prevents me getting it. I just don't like working with rented tools.

There's an excellent app called iSH which runs Alpine Linux on iOS. I wish it were possible to boot into iSH on the iPad

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But it's not a rented tool. The subscription is to give a developer the ability to work on a project in a sustainable way. It's open source. You can compile it yourself. How is that rented? This is a fairly niche product in the iOS ecosystem, it is also by far the best terminal for iOS. $20 per year is a pittance in the grand scheme of my tech purchases and well worth transforming my iPad into something more than just a youtube machine. I get that we are all sick of subscriptions but I would rather budget for $20 a year and get nice consistent updates and great support on discord over a product that has paid updates where you have to buy a completely new version just so the dev can continued to get paid.

Well said. Blink Shell is one of the few apps that justifies its price point and they have actively worked hard to bring more features to it over the years. Even so, since its release it’s been the best shell app on iOS bar none.

I think you have the wrong mental model for tools that you need to use for work. If you purchase a one-off license for a tool, you are entering an endless undefined relationship with the vendor. What support model are you expecting? You haven't paid for any. If iOS updates tomorrow and your software becomes unusable, does the vendor owe you a fix? What about in 6 months? 12? What if it isn't iOS changing but just something you specifically find buggy? You've paid your money, do you expect the developer to work for free from then on?

By purchasing a subscription what you are doing is committing to a revenue stream so that you know the product is being maintained, updated, and supported. If they don't keep the software supported, up to date, bugfixed? Cancel your subscription. Especially for tools like this - which generally are aimed at people using it for their job - you should be valuing those things. You should be avoiding buying tools from companies who don't have a clear model to continue to support your use over time.

If I purchase a hammer, I expect no support unless it is faulty within a reasonable period after purchase. If there is a fault in that time, the vendor must refund my money or fix the hammer.

If the world stops making nails compatible with my hammer down the line, I don't expect the vendor to do anything about it.

iSH is a restricted x86 emulator, so booting to it will never happen. But one can hope…

It's also 100% open source and GPLv3 Licensed: https://github.com/blinksh/blink

You can just clone the repo, build it yourself and use it 100% free as in beer and speech.

Due to the way apple restricts development on their platform, one has to recompile/reinstall homebrew software every 7 days for it to work, effectively killing FOSS development for people who don't own the bundle/app IDs. I once paid a 100$ to try and contribute support for NFC for an open source app, only to not be able to use my functionality without upstreaming it. Judging from this experience alone, it feels like Apple hates FOSS.

Apple doesn’t precisely hate FOSS, but it loves its income sources and the sweet revenue coming from them. Obviously it will protect them, duh.

Yes, but for this reason alone I believe there is far less FOSS software on iOS.

The point isn’t that it’s easy to do but that it’s fully doable for someone that doesn’t want to contribute the $20/year to development of the software.

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