Comment by y0ghur7_xxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by y0ghur7_xxx | Hacker News Reader

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I think Apples long term plan is the same: make a closed ecosystem on the Desktop exactly like the one on iOS. There is no incentive that I can see for them to keep it open. It worked well on mobile, why not do the same on the desktop?

But of course it's only speculation at this point.

That sounds like a pretty scary future where one can only use "pre-approved" apps from a couple of entities like Microsoft or Apple. Android will remain the only open system from this point of view (Linux, too, but it's not very popular with consumers right now).

Sure people will still jailbreak stuff in the future, but making jailbreaking illegal is just one bill away. If you remember, that almost happened about 2 years ago, but fortunately a lot of people protested against it that time.

Google wants you to think Android's open. It's not.

Seiously guy, go away. I'm so tired of hearing this. Android is open, Google apps are not. You can download the source for Android right now, modify it freely, and put it on a device. It may not be as open as some Linux distros, in that not everyone can submit code that will make it in to the official distro, but it is still open.

I don't see any problem with saying that Android is not an open system. They use open source, but the way it is distributed takes away many of the freedoms of OSS. Also, most of the system is really in the Apps, many of which are closed source. In other words, Android is as much open source as the iOS is, because it is based on an open source kernel but the user space is full of non-open components. And good luck trying to contribute something back to the owners of the system...

> Android is as much open source as the iOS is

I didn't realize iOS was open source! Where can I get the source?

Right now, you can install applications distributed by non-authorized third parties onto many Android systems, and you cannot do so on any iOS system without jailbreaking. There are many other important meanings of "open" which Android may or may not satisfy, but those aren't what's being discussed here.

>the way it is distributed

Oh really? http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html

That's an old version of Android. The current version is not open to anyone but Google employees.

It may not be the development trunk, but it's not an "old version". It's the latest release, 4.1.1.

Eh, releases are arbitrary points in the development cycle. There is new, stable, stuff in the dev trunk today, we just don't get to see it.

I don't see any difference between Google code-dumping (because that's all they do) "releases" of Android and iD Software open-sourcing old versions of idTech. iD is just more honest about it.

An open source project only requires that you can see the code, not that you can see what any one person or team is working on at any given moment.

Calling Google dishonest for making the latest released version of Android available seems disingenuous, at best.

In fact, many of the FSF's own open source projects had closed-off development processes from the start with only periodic source drops available.

If you remove the community-based aspect from open source, there is not much of an advantage in it. This idea of regular code-drops seem just like a way of maintaining the minimum requirements to conform to the open source tag.

Android's system for public contribution looks good to me: http://source.android.com/source/submit-patches.html

If you'll look at a few recent commits in the Android code-review system, you'll see quite a few non-Google email addresses: https://android-review.googlesource.com/

I can side load apps on my Android device. I can install things like Cyanogenmod. How is this not more open?

I think you're right, and that sideloading (which is really just normal loading, as people have done since the dawn of computing) is the most important test of openness for a platform. If you can write a program, and hand it to me somehow, and I can install it - and the platform developer doesn't have a veto over it - that means the platform is open.

Platform openness is really important, too. It means that people can write and share applications that the platform developer may not approve of - benchmarks, secure network code, games with controversial content - the list goes on.

That isn't to claim that an open source platform isn't a good thing. But open closed-source platforms have been a huge boon to the world since the dawn of computing, while closed closed-source platforms are problematic.

I'm not going to debate absolutes, but it is patently obvious that Android is relatively more open than iOS or Windoze by such an immense margin that your statement seems, well... asinine. Could it be better? Yes, absolutely. But, given the BS business model that Microsoft has always had (which is really the same for Apple, though they are better at marketing), Android is a hippie commune by comparison.

What do you think about the prospect of Gecko?

You should really check out Cory Doctorow's "The coming war on general-purpose computing": http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-p...

and: http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

How will one develop apps in such an environment?

Similarly to how you do on Windows 8 just now, I would imagine. XCode would work fine, can compile apps, run them for debugging locally. You just can't debug apps without getting a developer key, and that developer key would only be valid for your machine.

The grandparent described the environment being "exactly" like iOS. That would mean no terminal, for example. It would mean no 3rd party dev tools that can do much of anything (except SSH into another computer and do dev there). No Homebrew. Web development would be impossible - all web devs would leave.

Sounds like a lot of negatives for Apple and few positives. Makes more sense to make it difficult for common users to do the things they don't want them to do.

Sure, the default environment would be. But I expect they would do something where, if you had a paid developer license (or some sort of free "local debugging" license), they would unlock the Terminal and some form of IDE.

> The grandparent described the environment being "exactly" like iOS.

Let me make my point clearer: I was talking about the ability of downloading and installing apps freely from the internet. What I meant was a closed ecosystem where you can only use approved apps from the app store without the ability to install apps from third partys.

That does not mean that you can't use the terminal or XCode (if those are approved apps), or get a "developer license" to "unlock" your Mac.

I don't see any benefit to them doing this. Macs are computers, used by developers, for a variety of things, not just writing iOS apps. Increasing the cost of very expensive Macs by another $100/year, and taking away the feeling of ownership for those developers, is just a means of driving them away.

Only with Apple's tools.

I'm not sure about that. With the way they've built gatekeeper it seems they might eventually set that to only allow installation of store apps by default but make it easy to turn off.

While I'm worried about this happening eventually, I think Gatekeeper is a sign of the opposite. If Apples intentions were to make it like iOS, they wouldn't have bothered introducing that, they would have pushed everyone into the App Store instead.

I wouldn't be surprised to see IOS devices canabalise the desktop and laptop markets over time. My guess is Apple would be quite happy with this.

Apple has no intent to lock down their OS.

How could you possibly know that?

I dunno, the mac store, and the fact that you now need to jump through hoops to run .app files you grab online seem like a solid step towards lock down to me.

Note, I say this as a MBP + iPhone owner. It's just hard to think Apple wouldn't do to OSX what they have on iOS if they think they can get away with it.

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