

Palm complains about Apple to USB governing body - tlrobinson
http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/24/palm-complains-about-apple-to-usb-governing-body-while-pre-it/

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duskwuff
Really, Palm, is it _that_ hard to write your own sync software?

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chaosmachine
The difficulty of writing sync software is probably not their motivation here.

Palm is getting tons of free press, and they come out looking like the heroes,
fighting for openness against an overly proprietary Apple.

And it's working brilliantly. Just look at this story, with its 100+ upvotes:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=722294>

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jsz0
Are they though? Openiness would be making their own open platform and letting
anyone play. They're fighting for the ability to wedge themselves into a
proprietary platform.

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whughes
Just mount your Pre as a USB drive and drag your MP3s on if you don't like
iTunes. Most music apps support that or can be made to support it anyway,
since it's very common among other MP3 players. That's about as open as you
can get. iTunes is just a nice bonus.

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jimmybot
Let me rephrase that for you: "Just use a new workflow that you're not used to
--mount your Pre as a USB drive and drag your MP3s on-- _even though_ you like
and are invested in iTunes."

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whughes
You're looking at my comment in the wrong context. Here is what I was
responding to:

"Are they though? Openiness would be making their own open platform and
letting anyone play. They're fighting for the ability to wedge themselves into
a proprietary platform."

That is also "a new workflow that you're not used to." I'm saying that the Pre
offers _both_ options.

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nudded
I don't understand why so many people are supporting Palm. They are obviously
breaking the law by pretending the device was created by Apple. Not only that
but they also try to make Apple look bad in the mean time.

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nailer
I don't understand why people are supporting Compaq. They are obviously
breaking the law by pretending the device was created by IBM. Not only that,
but they also try and make IBM look bad at the same time.

I don't understand why people are supporting Microsoft. They are obviously
breaking the law by pretending the file was created by WordPerfect. Not only
that, but they also try and make WordPerfect look bad at the same time.

I don't understand why people are supporting OpenOffice. They are obviously
breaking the law by pretending the file was created by Word. Not only that,
but they also try and make Microsoft look bad at the same time.

~~~
duskwuff
That argument would only apply if Apple was somehow locking Palm out of some
data. But they aren't: iTunes writes out an XML file describing its library
contents. ($HOME/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml on OS X, probably
similar on Windows.) With that data in hand, it's probably _easier_ to sync
files over to the Pre with their own software than it is to reverse-engineer
the iPod's database format and make syncing work from within iTunes.

