Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Apple's restrictions have little to do with controlling device owners

I would think you were making a joke if not for the earnest tone of your post. But, come on, that is a ridiculous statement to make.

We had free as in freedom, free as in beer, and then Steve Jobs came up with free as in "freedom from porn". You appear to buy into that doublespeak redefinition of freedom without irony.

The Soviet Union made a similar to give people freedom -- from class distinction, religious persecution, etc., and it used the same logic. (And was just as true.)

Apple's restrictions are all about controlling device owners to make Apple more money. (Otherwise they would be "suggestions".)

You may not install apps that don't pay Apple 30% of their revenues. You may not install apps that compete with Apple's favored apps. You may not even keep functionality you've already bought from Apple's store and been using, if Apple realizes after the fact that it conflicts with their lucrative hardware licensing deals (Airfoil Speakers).

I'm not saying there aren't user-experience benefits to be had from a locked-down experience; there are, and Apple obviously knows it.

I'm saying freedom doesn't what you think it means, and I don't think even Frank Luntz could make it mean that.

"The Soviet Union made a similar"

Oh come on, one is a market proposition and the other is a forced choice at the barrel of a gun. Is the "no shirt no shoes no service" sign at the store down the street the second coming of Stalin too?

Ha ha, OK I admit that analogy was too heavy-handed for the context. It didn't feel so as I wrote it, maybe because I had already walked it back from 'Arbeit macht frei', which was the first thing to come to mind.

The point I wanted to make was that it feels kinda creepy when people start believe the propaganda (of a government, corporation, cult, or whatever it may be) that calls it "freedom", when it's actually the other thing.

You're right that it's certainly not freedom that Apple is selling.

The correct counterargument to Doctorow et al has to take the freedom issue head on, it looks like this:

When people move from the country to a small town they are forced to give up some freedoms. When the small town turns into a large town even more. A large city, even more.

I can't crank the stereo to 11 and play it at all hours every night on my block of dense apartment buildings. I also can't keep a pet rhino, walk around outside naked or throw my tv out the window onto the sidewalk 14 floors down. I could list these all day and there are some legitimate things I should be free to do but I can't, that's a slightly harmful byproduct we accept for convenience.

Regulation is an easy scapegoat but every 'wild west' town with no rules either got a serious government willing to make those trade offs or it died out. That's universal not just in the US.

One of the well known promises of technology is to shrink the world and connect everyone to everyone. In short we'll all be much closer cyberneighbors then today and there will be large sacrifices to privacy and other freedoms just like people who moved or found themselves in cities had to make.

Another well known byproduct of technology has been the amount of potential damage a small group of people can do (Aum cult, McVeigh, Unabomber, Amerithrax). This again will act as a multiplier on the trade offs we will be forced to make as we move from the ability to 3d print guns to bomb materials to nuclear and biologic molecules.

The deeply interconnected world of tomorrow will need people to wear virtual pants. QED.

You make some good points, but I think it's important to make a distinction between the management of behavior by fiat and the management of behavior by response to improper actions. The examples you give for restricted behaviors are clearly valid, but they don't imply that I should not be allowed to own a stereo or TV on the chance that I might crank it to 11 or throw it out the window. I think that the issue at stake here is more closely related to the opposite case, where we would be disallowed from owning those things for fear of future misbehavior.

In my opinion, there is a profound difference between limiting a person's behavior by eliminating their ability to decide versus limiting it by responding to transgressions. The logic of limiting ability to decide ends with a gilded cage, which is something I'd prefer to avoid.

So will we be able to have sex without the entire 3D full-sensory experience recording immediately being uploaded to 2050 Youtube?

> Apple's restrictions are all about controlling device owners to make Apple more money. (Otherwise they would be "suggestions".)

It's worth pointing out that Apple allows free (beer and speech) apps in the iOS App Store, and in fact most of the apps are free (as in beer). They are not making any money on those--to the contrary, they are an expense that Apple incurs.

Now, it's true that to get a free app into the App Store, a developer must pay their $99 to get their app signed. But--that still does not make Apple any money from device owners.

Code signing is a well understood security for verifying the integrity of end-user software; this is a plausible explanation for the app distribution lockdown of iOS, especially since that is Apple's own explanation.

And of course the App Store on the Mac (and code signing in general) remains optional.

You seem to be under the impression that phones once were free & loose, and then Apple locked them down. Phones never were free - carriers controlled what went on them, and what features were used. Apple opened devices up to a level never before seen - no more carrier crap pre-loaded, and a serious push to improve data pipes and 3G availability throughout North America. Not to mention an app marketplace NOT controlled by the carriers, and an web browsing experience that doesn't require you to be snooped on by WAP gateways.

Do you not still see the (baseless) grief Apple gets from carriers about how their phones are "data hogs"? Or how the media breathlessly claims the retina display is going to clog up all of our bandwidth from higher resolution video and pictures?

Phones were always locked down heavily, Apple blew up that up to a large extent, but not completely, of course, as they are in business.... But today's variety of walled gardens are mostly untouchable by the carriers.

> Apple's restrictions are all about controlling device owners to make Apple more money. (Otherwise they would be "suggestions".)

No, the restrictions are all about curating an experience. Suggestions require choice. Most people don't want to make choices on how their phones work, they want to be handed experience with most decisions made for them, and for popular variations to be tweakable. "Opinionated software".

> You may not install apps that don't pay Apple 30% of their revenues.

Well, yes, they are capitalists, shame on them.

> You may not install apps that compete with Apple's favored apps.

That sucked, I agree, but that's changing. Chrome is out for iOS. Alternative Email clients are out. Apple generally is known for good customer service according to most customer satisfaction surveys, and presuming these people are semi-rational beings, that usually implies Apple actually listens to them (eventually).

> I'm saying freedom doesn't what you think it means, and I don't think even Frank Luntz could make it mean that.

You seem to be confusing political freedom with freedom to violate others' property.

Firstly, you do realize that you have political freedom -- people are completely free to jailbreak their phones, no police will come after you. If you violate your carrier's T&Cs they can fire you as a customer, but that's due to years of historically poor regulation of telecom in the USA.

Secondly, none of the software you use, that you haven't written, is owned by you. All owners of that software have a restriction on your behaviour with that software, including free or open source software. You have never been completely free when you use software. Thus, degree of openness is just a feature. Apple is trying to find a balance that people care about. Naturally developers & technical folks don't like losing the freedom to tinker, while most people couldn't care less. Apple needs to maintain a developer community that tinkers, though. So it's a balancing act.

An iPad is not a phone. An iPod Touch is not a phone. Even on phones, many, maybe most, aspects of the lockdown have nothing to do with carriers' interests. Apple has decided it likes being like a carrier; its relation to users has changed from computer company to jealous boyfriend.

(I'm not getting involved beyond your first paragraph.)

There is a spectrum of openness when it comes to computing devices. At one end you have computers that are very open, with all of the problems that come with that, and at the other extreme you have fixed-function devices such as printers. In between, you have things like game consoles, smartphones, and other mobile devices.

iDevices are more closed than computers, sure, but they are much more open than say a Nintendo DS, whose SDK costs an order of magnitude more than iOS devlopment. This is as it should be, as iDevices are more flexible than a games console.

Viewed as a continuum of openness, Apple's products seem to me to be exactly where you would expect them to be. You could argue that they should be alittle more open, some even argue that they should be more closed, but overall their success in the market would seem to bear out the theory that they are roughly in the right spot.

This claim (that there's a big niche for curated computing with one central curator) would sway me a little if it weren't for all the patent litigation. And the really strong network effects in OS adoption.

Where I'd expect them to be: no correlation a priori between whether a computer has a multitouch interface and whether its own owner can choose what software to run.

"Phones were always locked down heavily ?"

Ah, you must not have lived through the PDA-phones age. That's a good 5-10 years even before the iPhone came out.

Those were still basically locked down on the phone/baseband part, with a PDA glued on. They weren't anywhere near as closely coupled as today's smartphones.

I think we were talking about applications when we say "locked down"...

The applications didn't have API access to anything "phonelike" about the phone; it was just a PDA glued onto a phone. You could write your own PDA apps, but nothing really interesting.

Most of the applications were far more advanced that what you find on the iPhone and Android (at least until recently after pouring years of development into iOs and Android) - there's no way you can disqualify the PDA apps as being "not really interesting", and you had access to phone functions through the development environment. Of course, there was no accelerator, no multi-touch screen, no GPS, so a number of functions were missing but the software part was advanced and very capable. That was when the iPod was big as a brick and could not run any application, for your information.

What platform or apps are you talking about? I remember WinCE (Compaq Ipaq) which I hacked to run Linux, but I only ever had the PDA form of those, and it was essentially a small laptop (ipaq + cradle + 4GB HDD on CF card + metricom ricochet modem), and the Handspring (PalmOS) things. Nothing on PalmOS was particularly advanced. WinCE did have a lot of desktop-app-ports, but I didn't know anyone actually used them.

I used applications on WinCE - I had a Toshiba PDA. I cannot remember all the application names, but SPB was one of the key developpers for the platforms and their organizer/calendar/scheduler apps (Spb Calendar if I remember correctly) was much better than what you could find on iOS or Android until recently. There were also applications that could open and edit actual word documents and excel sheets (forgot the name) which worked pretty well for tweaking existing files.

The main drawback was the lack of a good browser - these were the days before firefox/chromium so there were no real alternatives out there.

But I had Skype running to call people YEARS before any smartphone could do it. Smartphones were just catching up to what the original PDAs were capable of doing, basically.

There are ways to offer predefined paths for those people that don't care about choice without taking away choice from everyone. Apple has completely failed at providing this because they're hungry for control and want to impose their will upon their customers. Ideally all people that use computers.

>Firstly, you do realize that you have political freedom -- people are completely free to jailbreak their phones, no police will come after you

Apple wanted to make jailbreaking illegal and were stopped by the USG. They wanted police to come after you, but apparently you don't remember that part.

> Secondly, none of the software you use, that you haven't written, is owned by you

There's a huge difference between not owning software and still controlling it because it's your machine and not owning software and being out of luck because Apple can remote-delete it.

> There are ways to offer predefined paths for those people that don't care about choice without taking away choice from everyone. Apple has completely failed at providing this because they're hungry for control and want to impose their will upon their customers. Ideally all people that use computers.

And their customers are thanking them for it. Apple's control is primarily about improving the overall experience of the user, and secondarily about extracting as much revenue as they can from the platform they created. Seems like a good tradeoff to iOS users (for now).

I completely agree there should be competitive alternatives to Apple's approach. My point is that openness is a feature, and the market should decide the level of openness that matters. So far the market seems to support the theory that a general purpose computing model like the PC world does not suit the mobile device world.

> There's a huge difference between not owning software and still controlling it because it's your machine and not owning software and being out of luck because Apple can remote-delete it.

And if they abuse that trust, they'll lose customers.

You're working from the assumption that openness (and by extension freedom, privacy) are features, but they're more than that.

They are essential human needs and the market can not be relied upon to provide them, they must be enforced. Convenience is very alluring and freedom is very difficult. Most people will choose convenience, that I already know - what is extremely important is that there is always a Free option available and that corporations like Apple are mercilessly criticized whenever they fail to uphold the ideals of openness.

You can relax and think the market will look out for your rights and you'll wake up with your hands tied behind your back parasubvert. These "tradeoffs" always seem nice until you're trapped.

You are absolutely right that is my assumption. I do not believe software openness is an ideal or moral position. It's an economic feature, through and through, in my opinion. I am a big supporter of open source for the economic benefits, but I do not subscribe to the FSF philosophy of freedom.

> All owners of that software have a restriction on your behaviour with that software, including free or open source software.

Quoting the GNU GPL (v2, since it's less legalese-esque):

> The act of running the Program is not restricted

Good point, it strikes me that with the changing landscape perhaps Eric Raymond and others who claim "open source" has won and we no longer need "free software" may want to rethink that.

But the act of copying, distributing, or modifying said software is restricted. Much more so than, say, the Apache license. Those are behaviours too.

The GPL controls you "in your own interests", or to quote them:

> To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.

The point is that you don't own the software you run, the owner has a claim on your freedom. In GPL's case it's for what they feel is the greater good (more free software, and limited free-loading).

Well, so does a law that prevents you from selling your labor as a slave, but I don't think you would see that as bad.

For the fact of 'owning' the software... well, as long as you don't redistribute it, who cares. And if you do restribute it, why should you take away from your users the same freedom that was given to you? (by making your software proprietary or by limiting the use they can make)

What does slavery have to do with this? There's ample discussions over the past 10 years over why many people disagree with the approach the GPL takes as being too restrictive and freedom-restricting, and not actually in the spirit of "open". I don't have to even argue that, it's been done before ad nauseum. Of course many support the GPL and it's approach. The point on GPL is that "freedom is a feature", it's all in the eye of the beholder of what's more important - free to use & redistribute, or free to use but only redistribute under certain circumstances. The choice has massive implications for people using that software - I've seen many a review of weeding all GPLv3 or AGPL dependencies out of a product for this very reason.

The original point is that Cory seems to think that protecting user's freedoms first requires securing device owner's freedoms, though the two come into conflict regularly, and he doesn't have clear answers of how to resolve that. I'm suggesting that he's not looking at ownership broadly enough.

Fair enough, as you say it's in the eye of the beholder.

What I'd like is a precise use of terms. Saying (as most do) that GPL is restrictive is imprecise. As you better put it, GPL is restrictive on redistribution.

As for ownership, I'd like you to expand on what you think about it. As you say Cory didn't look broadly enough, so I'd like to read further opinions about it.

"Phones never were free - carriers controlled what went on them" This is only relevant for USA, not the rest of the world. All around the globe you could walk into a store, buy any phone you wanted, buy a carrier's SIM and insert into that. So the Apple model is a kind of dropback.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com