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Comment by ksk | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's a horrible headline. Did anyone actually read the letter? His position is far less extreme. All hes essentially advocating for is open protocols so that popular services aren't locked down to a single platform. It's an interesting question whether government should mandate interoperability.

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That's not what he says:

  Unlike BlackBerry, which allows iPhone users to download and
  use our BBM service, Apple does not allow BlackBerry or 
  Android users to download Apple’s iMessage messaging 
  service. Netflix, which has forcefully advocated for carrier 
  neutrality, has discriminated against BlackBerry customers
  by refusing to make its streaming movie service available 
  to them.

His phrasing is clumsy because hes not a programmer. The issue is that its rather "impossible" to create BB apps for some services because they're locked down. If NetFlix and Apple were to open the API, that would be enough for anyone (including BB employees) to create the app themselves. I don't think BB is so poor that they couldn't hire a few devs to get the apps written.

Netflix and Apple don't have to open up anything if they don't want to. It's their service and ultimately they can choose which platforms to support. This is just whining from BlackBerry.

>It's their service and ultimately they can choose which platforms to support.

I think you're thoroughly confused. A documented protocol can be implemented on any general purpose platform.

Remember the binary document formats from Microsoft? People had to reverse engineer that shit once upon a time. Not anymore, its all XML now. Microsoft didn't have to "support" Linux. They merely had to document their format. Certainly, OOXML has its own problems but these days almost ANY service/application can read/write MS document formats.

What are you going on about? Apple and Netflix offer a service, not a protocol that should be used by everyone. They decide which platform to support — this isn't about any protocol.

So his position seems to be that either these services should provide native clients for these platforms, or else they should expose APIs to let third-party developers create native clients.

That's still not a position I'm comfortable with. (I wish everybody exposed APIs to third-party clients, but I understand how hard that can be.) On the other hand, it's a lot more reasonable than unconditionally forcing devs to port their apps over.

Well, his actual letter doesn't mention the phrase "API," so reading such a request into it seems like a stretch: http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/blackberry-net-neutralit...

I did read the letter and his position is extreme: the BBC captured it accurately.

Anytime you write a letter to Congress that includes the phrase "must be mandated" -- as Blackberry's CEO did -- it's abundantly clear you're asking for a new law.

Now, I admit the question of whether or not this particular proposed law is extreme or not is a judgment call, but forcing programmers (at gunpoint?) to develop for other platforms seems a bit extreme to me. Also not a recipe for very good code. :)

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