
Steve Jobs Promised Open Source FaceTime Back in 2010: What Happened? - denzil_correa
https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-promised-to-make-facetime-open-source-its-time/
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gowld
The article title is simply wrong. Jobs promised to make open standards, not
open source.

To people talking about Virtex and server hosting: an open protocol doesn't
imply that that a server must handle traffic for free. Your webserver runs an
open protocol (HTTP) but only allows connections from authorized clients.

Video-chat providers could sell access to their chat-hosting, or make peering
agreements with other providers, like the regular Internet.

But Jobs wasn't _really_ interested in that; he was riding a marketing wave
making promises he didn't have to keep.

~~~
satai
It's just a long way to say he was laying...

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jedberg
Relatedly, what I don't get is how everyone is so excited about many-user
FaceTime. I'm just glad they finally _brought it back_.

Back in 2008 or 2009, all of team reddit used iChat AV to have a video
meeting, and one of us was in California, one in Boston, and two in Australia.
And it worked flawlessly. And it worked on Windows!

FaceTime still hasn't caught up to Apple's own discontinued product ten years
later.

~~~
Schlaefer
You could also show any Quicklook supported file in the iChat AV video stream.
I remember doing some remote Keynote presentations that way. Resolutions
wasn't great, but it worked. Ten+ years ago.

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nextstep
This article is silly: they answer their own question at the end but pretend
like this is still some big mystery or Apple never actually intended to nor
wants to open source FaceTime.

But without the VirnetX patents and the peer-to-peer architecture, this
service requires significantly greater backend resources. I’m not sure how
Apple could feasibly open this standard to third party clients now.

~~~
raldi
_> they answer their own question at the end_

They do? Where?

~~~
JustSomeNobody
> There's also an ongoing lawsuit to consider -- as Ars Technica documented in
> 2013, Apple was forced to majorly change how FaceTime works to avoid
> infringing on the patents of a company called VirnetX. Instead of letting
> phones communicate directly with each other, Apple added "relay servers" to
> help the phones connect.

> Presumably, someone would have to pay for those servers, and/or figure out a
> way for them to talk to Google or Microsoft or other third-party servers if
> FaceTime were going to be truly open.

~~~
dingaling
VirnetX is a listed company. Apple could simply buy them out from under the
Board's feet and throw them in the dumpster and not even notice the cost.

~~~
raldi
Market cap: 202M

~~~
cpmouter
Apple makes that in what? Ten minutes? ;-)

~~~
glenra
> Apple makes that in what? Ten minutes? ;-)

About a day and a half. (that's based on 2017's $48 billion net income)

So Apple almost certainly could _afford_ to buy the company, but they'd need a
business case for doing so, weighing that option against all the OTHER nice
things they might want to spend $200 million on.

~~~
code_duck
Apple also has something like 250 billion in liquid assets.

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therealmarv
WhatsApp has video group calling very soon too. But Facetime is at minimum an
Apple account/id thing the same as Google Meet (which is great btw) is for
Google accounts. So I don't see how Facetime really solves something in that
area even when it would work for Android and Windows PCs. Side note: actually
the algorithms used in Google Duo and Meet are better for low bandwidth (which
you have in many areas of the world) than Facetime ever was.

~~~
saurik
We currently have only one person in our entire company of 15-20 people who
uses both Android and Windows, and have been considering just buying her an
iPod so she can use iMessage/Facetime.

~~~
dogma1138
Im surprised she didn’t bought one herself it’s fairly easy usually to use an
iPhone/Mac in a non-Apple environment the other way around is impossible
because the native or exclusive solutions are quite good or at least
entrenched enoguh to be used nearly exclusively.

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SippinLean
There's a Facetime-quality video chat app that runs on Apple and non-Apple
hardware already, it's called Google Duo

~~~
colejohnson66
But is it end to end encrypted like FaceTime?

~~~
slac
Yes according to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Duo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Duo)

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hamilyon2
Isn't webrtc that open standard that everybody wants?

We just need good client and server implementations with reasonable fallbacks
for nat traversal, nice UI.

~~~
thosakwe
Houseparty, another video chatting app that is picking up steam, uses WebRTC.

WebRTC is P2P also, so I think that on a large scale it would be far less
expensive, AND also afford way less laggy VoIP.

~~~
beokop
WebRTC is garbage for group video. Since all clients have their own set of
protocols they support you either have to a) re-encode N times to give each
client what they want or b) use some sort of lowest common denominator
encoding that all clients accept.

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st3fan
The domain name is still available - openfacetime.org - I am happy to donate
it to an open source project. Ping me on Twitter @satefan

(I registered the domain while I was sitting in the audience at the WWDC where
Jobs announced it would be open source)

~~~
Djvacto
Kind of sounds like the URL for a site about open-face sandwiches.

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minimaxir
Incidentally, an unexpected benefit of the server-relay FaceTime
implementation is the ability for Apple to allow 32-person FaceTime calls
which was a feature just announced on Monday.

~~~
koolba
Wouldn’t that require not being end to end encryption as well?

They can’t stitch and re-encode the video streams if they can’t decode it
server side.

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MBCook
Couldn’t you just encode the video for all 31 other public keys?

I believe Apple explicitly said it was still end-to-end encrypted.

~~~
greiskul
Wouldn't this increase the upload bandwidth needed by 31?

There might be a way for it to be end-to-end encrypted, but it's not a simple
problem.

~~~
markatto
You could use a block cipher for the actual video stream with a single key,
and encrypt that key with all 31 public keys.

~~~
MBCook
That was the kind of thing I was thinking of. One video stream someone
encrypted so any one of X people could decode it.

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awat
Jump off point for VirnetX

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirnetX](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirnetX)

~~~
urda
Non mobile link:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirnetX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirnetX)

------
upofadown
According this article:

* [http://blog.krisk.org/2013/09/apples-new-facetime-sip-perspe...](http://blog.krisk.org/2013/09/apples-new-facetime-sip-perspective.html)

... FaceTime is more or less SIP hacked to work better with the crummy
Internet we have to contend with these days. So we probably know enough to
make something compatible. What we don't have is any assurance that Apple
would allow such interoperation going forward.

The problem is not actually technical...

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shmerl
_> And since there are good reasons for Apple to keep it that way, it probably
never will. _

These reasons are far from good. Same as all Apple's obnoxious lock-in.

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cp9
that is not what he promised. he promised standards, not an open source
implementation

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pluc
He died?

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gsich
It's dead anyway, unless all your contacts (the ones you want to communicate
with) own Apple devices.

~~~
blowski
Only the person you want to talk with at that moment needs to be on an Apple
device.

For example, my wife and I both have iPhones, so we use FaceTime because it’s
easier. My niece doesn’t, so we use Skype.

Just because you personally aren’t using it, doesn’t mean it’s “dead”.

~~~
gsich
It's dead. If Email would only work between the same vendor, I would call it
dead too. So dead means technologically dead. I would not recommend anyone
using it. It doesn't allow cross vendor communication.

~~~
gsich
Love the downvotes from Apple fan(atics). It means that the truth stings.

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skrowl
They love their walled garden. When you point out > 80% of new devices sold
are Android and can't use FaceTime, they don't care and just downvote without
comment.

~~~
blowski
HN in general frowns upon flamewar topics. Making comments like “FaceTime is
dead” with no data to back it up, and “it’s only iPhone fanatics downvoting
me” doesn’t contribute to a meaningful discussion. That’s why it’s being
downvoted.

~~~
gsich
Although I haven't said your quotes directly, it's still the truth. Making the
same comment about Skype wouldn't have resulted in downvotes. This is probably
because although Android devices are more common in general terms, here it is
more likely to be 50/50\. Hence the downvotes from Apple fan(atics).

