
Closed for Business - johns
http://mattgemmell.com/2012/07/23/closed-for-business/
======
mindcrime
_You search the internet for pirate copies of apps, then copy them onto your
(regular, unrooted, non-“jailbroken”) device, and launch them. The system is
designed for piracy from the ground up._

OK, I admit, I couldn't read past this sentence. This is so much complete and
total bullshit that I closed the tab in disgust.

The ability to sideload apps on a non-rooted, non-jailbroken device is
_exactly_ what any and every device I own absolutely must support and this is
non-negotiable. If I own a piece of computing hardware, I will have the
freedom to install and run any software I want, regardless of where or how I
obtained. Oh, and I don't use pirated software.

Given that people are already talking about a "war on general purpose
computing"[1], it's downright shameful for this guy to run around promoting
the idea that open devices are designed to enable piracy.

[1]: <http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html>

~~~
tptacek
So, to paraphrase:

"Guy doesn't agree with me on something fundamental. Shame on him."

~~~
yock
I don't think that's what he said at all. I read it as a criticism of a bad
premise. Do you mean to imply that there is so such thing?

~~~
tptacek
He wrote "it's downright shameful for this guy to run around promoting the
idea". There is a level of badness at which ideas become shameful to promote,
but that's a pretty high bar to clear, and I'm pretty sure electronic brands
that don't actually kill people can't clear it at all.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
It really bugs me when people lop off parts of sentences to make a quote in a
different context. What he actually wrote was " _it's downright shameful for
this guy to run around promoting the idea that open devices are designed to
enable piracy_ ". The idea that _open devices are designed to enable piracy_
should not really be one of those "well, that is your opinion" type of things.
It is a broad generalization that is flat wrong because... well... it is such
a broad generalization. Open devices are designed to... uh... be open. To
enable user control. To enable hobbyist tinkering. To enable community help.
Being that the "enable piracy" idea is dead wrong, promoting it is dangerous &
harmful... thus worthy of shame.

~~~
tptacek
I haven't cut off context. You just disagree with his idea so strongly that it
upsets you for him to even have it.

I don't believe "openness" connotes "intent to enable piracy", but "piracy is
far more rampant in the open Android ecosystem than the closed iOS ecosystem"
isn't an unreasonable observation to make, and, having made it, "openness
promotes piracy" isn't a totally unreasonable conclusion to draw from it.

Stop telling people to be embarrassed about their ideas. It's a very poor
rhetorical strategy. The only benefit it accrues to you is that it riles your
supporters up into similarly gnarly expressions of contempt. It certainly
doesn't persuade anyone of anything.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
The internet has a lot of porn... but I don't think it would be reasonable to
conclude the internet promotes porn.

The world has a lot of racists... but I don't think it would be reasonable to
conclude the world promote racism.

~~~
tptacek
The Internet definitely promotes porn.

Reasonable people have observed that Google profits off piracy in other
contexts.

Your last sentence is a non sequitur.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Porn is definitely promoted on the Interent... but I don't think it is
accurate to say that _The Interent_ promotes porn. Or that the Internet was
designed to enable porn.

So... reasonable people observed that Google profits off piracy... and that
leads to the conclusion that "open devices are designed to enable piracy"?

> _Your last sentence is a non sequitur._

Side note: Interesting that _non sequitur_ has two different uses that make
you either wrong or right depending on which you were using.

If you are thinking of it as a literary device because of its apparent lack of
meaning relative to what preceded it, then I would say you are wrong. It is an
example of how the formula _THIS has a lot of THAT, therefore THIS promotes
THAT_ is not an accurate formula. I believe it to be a relevant example,
therefore not a non sequitur (literary device)

If you are thinking of it in terms of logic because its conclusion does not
follow from its premises, then I would say you are right... because that was
the whole point of giving those examples. The premise of _THIS has a lot of
THAT_ is not sufficient to make the conclusion that _THIS promotes THAT_. It
almost never is. So... yes, a non sequitur (logic).

------
bonaldi
So very many things wrong with this piece.

1\. Show him the money: I'm not sure he's comparing apples with oranges here.
He makes a good living from iOS, but (crucially) by consulting for others who
themselves may not have a sustainable business model. There is an increasing
amount of evidence suggesting the indie dev model isn't sustainable on iOS,
either, from AppCubby and Sparrow to the iconFactory and more.

2\. Open vs Closed: I don't think one data point (the app store) is enough to
damn open platforms. The Mac is open by his definition, and so is Windows. Are
those both "bad for business"? Hardly.

3\. Open vs Open: He then conflates "open" (as in I can install anything I
want on it without going via a store) with "Open" as in open source, when the
two are very different. Piracy is possible on a on a closed-source open-
install platform, the open/closed nature of the source is absolutely
irrelevant here.

He tries to join the two with a hand-wavy "piracy is easy on Android because
it has an open mentality", when the source license has zip to do with this. It
makes all the later jabs about Stallman more than a little strawmanish.

4\. Choice vs Free: This is more a pedantic point, but you can't go from "too
much choice is bad" (which I'd agree with in certain contexts) to "and so
freedom is bad". He doesn't back that up, by the way, just asserts "but
freedom _is_ bad". No, it is not bad. Sometimes freedoms collide, and
sometimes they can be traded. But "overwhelming choice is bad" and
"overwhelming freedom is bad" are not synonymous statements.

5\. Lock it down (unless it's a movie or album that I want): His conclusion in
this piece is basically "Close it down and keep prices high to beat the
pirates". Which is an interesting contrast with
<http://mattgemmell.com/2012/02/17/the-piracy-threshold/> where he says "Open
it all up and keep the prices very low or I will pirate".

There's more to be had in this post, but I think I've reached enough errors to
abort. At least this one didn't end with "disagree? amuse me by telling me".

------
trimbo
> Stories like this come as no surprise, but the industry press rarely deals
> with the core problem - and nor does Google.

Yeah, except the part where Google announced encrypted applications from the
Android Market at Google I/O. The presenter got light applause and seemed
confused, asking for more applause. It seems that no one figured out the
implications of that. Apps will be encrypted with a device-specific key from
the store. People have been complaining about this since forever, Google is
taking a major step to address the piracy problem, and no one has noticed.

~~~
w33ble
Yeah, that was one of the biggest announcements they made this year. If it
works (and why wouldn't it?), it'll put an end to the piracy problem while at
the same time allowing you to side load any non-pirated application you want.

What wasn't clear to me was whether or not it was going to be enforced on
older versions of Android. I imagine it will be though.

------
bryanlarsen
Your whole article is based on a publicity stunt.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4280871>

Dead trigger makes its money from in-app purchases. In practice it is no more
free now than it was before.

Piracy is rampant on iOS too. It's slightly more harder on an iOS device, but
it's not exactly difficult.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
Dead Trigger was a bad example - personally I'm not wild about mixing purchase
and in-app purchase at all - but in the overall discussion others stated
similar experiences, in one case a developer quoting piracy rates of 90% on an
app which I believe had no in-app purchases (sorry, can't find the link now).

Football Manager 2012 handheld will be one I'll watch with interest. The
publishers Sports Interactive have said that it has it's targets for Android
and if it doesn't hit them there won't be another version. That's a massive
franchise (in the UK at least) so I'm keen to see whether it can justify it's
existence (selling price $5).

~~~
bryanlarsen
That sounds like a much better example. Being an existing franchise, it should
avoid what I believe to be the primary problem for both Android and iOS: app
discovery.

I remember an anecdote about a 90% piracy rate. It turns out that the game was
prominently listed on a popular pirate board, but was buried deeply on the app
store.

Combine that with a tendency for pirates to install huge numbers of games that
they'll never likely play, and a 90% piracy rate isn't surprising.

Personal anecdote: Massive sales cause me to buy games that I'll likely never
play. I just dropped over $50 on Steam because of their massive summer sale.
$20 went to the latest Humble Bundle. A few months ago I bought a bunch of
games for 10 freaking cents each on the Google store. I've purchased two
sequels and one in-app since for those games, but my total outlay is still
well under $10.

So I believe that the biggest problems on both Android and iOS are pricing and
discovery. Piracy is a problem, but not as much as pricing and discovery, IMO.

~~~
jamesjguthrie
"So I believe that the biggest problems on both Android and iOS are pricing
and discovery. Piracy is a problem, but not as much as pricing and discovery,
IMO."

I completely agree with you.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
I'm not sure I'd want to rank problems, but I'd like to see everyone working
on the problems they can solve (such as pricing and discoverability) before
they start saying with certainty that piracy is killing everything.

------
tomjen3
His entire premis would require that there could never be a software business
on the PC because it is open (it is far more open than Android). Thereis, so
he is wrong.

------
jack-r-abbit
> _here’s a tutorial on how to “sideload” Android apps (in practice, as with
> most articles that mention “backups” of software from nebulous sources, this
> is a tutorial about piracy)_

Uh... Sideloading is not about piracy. One of the nice things about Android is
that you are not locked into getting your apps from a store. I've sideloaded
apps my company is creating. I've sideloaded apps that friends have made. I've
sideloaded advance betas from companies I've had a relationship with.
Sideloading is just installing a file.

~~~
veridies
Yeah, I've sideloaded a number of betas or prerelease applications and have
_never_ pirated an Android application. This article's making some pretty big
assumptions.

------
B-Con
> Piracy is a symptom of failure to find an effective business model.

I hate this assumption, it's grounded in nothing but unwarranted optimism
about humanity.

Maybe people pirate because they're cheap, selfish, and don't like spending
money on things they can get for free. As the article established, people were
mass-pirating apps that were easier to install legitimately and cost less than
a buck anyway. If you pirate that, odds that you just need a better business
model to entice you to not pirate are slim to none.

That may not apply to everyone, but it does apply to a lot of people.

There is absolutely zero reason to believe that there is a perfect equilibrium
where business maximizes its goals and users have _no_ incentive to pirate.
The two are constantly at conflict (money is pretty much a zero-sum game, and
ultimately it all does come down to money in some way or another), and it's
hard to compete with free. No matter what you offer, if it has a cost then
it's hard to compete with that same offering minus the cost.

------
Tyrannosaurs
There are a lot of good points here but one thing I would say is that closer
is better for business _in the way it exists now_.

The overall point - that it's a failure of business models - is one of the two
truths that seem to me to be becoming evident in the whole "piracy" debate.

The second (which applies to "consumers") is if there's no valid business
model it's highly likely that you're going to see an impact on content
creation and availability for platforms where piracy is widespread.

But I find exciting that over the next 10 or 20 years markets will change
fairly radically as a result of these things. Personally, I'm no fan of
piracy, I think people should be paid for their work. However, I also think
that the genie is out of the bottle now and it's going to be a fact of the
world going forward and it's for all of us to learn to live with.

------
angrow
"A price-tag of one dollar is passive smoking. You’re killing people around
you, for your own short-term benefit."

They're killing their competition _and_ benefitting from it? Those poor fools!

~~~
xianshou
Actually, it's quite a good analogy. No one benefits from this strategy in the
final analysis because a race to the bottom makes all developers paupers.
Smoking a cigarette relieves the pains of addiction (delivers short-term
profit), kills you in the long term (destroys your business model), and
imperils the health of the people around you (makes iOS and Android less
desirable platforms).

That said, I disagree with the careless linking of FOSS principles and bad
market practices. Linux, BSD, Apache: these technologies and others have had
enormous positive impact that has enriched the industry as a whole more than
paid versions could ever have benefited individual developers. However, the
existence and promotion of FOSS in no way guarantees the cancer of one-dollar
apps. Only developers' persistent undervaluation of their own work can do
that. Specifically, their rush to capture the long tail of cheapskates at the
cost of forgoing the bulk of the consumer surplus makes the entire market less
desirable. Everybody loses when we must wade through a swamp of low-cost crap
rather than the garden of costlier but higher-quality services we'd wish for.

~~~
angrow
Casting price competition as a sin might be the most preposterous possible
reaction to market failure.

There are definitely barriers to making a living selling apps, but blaming
them on your fellow victims is utterly foolish.

~~~
xianshou
Of course price competition is a legitimate strategy wherever it occurs. I'm
simply arguing that it may not be the most effective in the short term or the
long.

Econ 101 says that competition will push prices down to the level where
everyone makes exactly enough to keep producing their product. Econ 101
assumes zero differentiation between products, zero brand value, etc., in
these cases of perfect competition.

If you are a developer who's making something innovative and useful, whether
on iOS or no, it is differentiated from the rest of the market. You are free
to compete on price by selling for $1, but you may also compete on quality,
solve a unique problem for your market, and sell for $5 or $10. I believe that
many developers are doing exactly the latter, but still selling for $1 simply
because they think it's "what is done." If they instead sold for $5 or $10,
people would still buy and the developer would make more money. If enough
people did this, it would remove the noxious attitude that "nothing is worth
more than a couple bucks on the App Store." Consumers would get better apps,
iOS developers would make a better living, and the ecosystem would improve as
a whole.

------
radley
We're Android-only developers and we're doing fine. Piracy was around long
before smart phones so you gotta know how to work with it.

We expect piracy of our apps and priced them accordingly. Our users pay the $2
simply for the ease of automatic updates & notifications. If you pirate the
app you'll always be a version (or 15) behind and have to keep up on your own.
If it's worth it, you clearly need the $2 more than us. Kewl.

For something you want to seriously scale, you have to do it for free anyway.
It's still land rush for new markets. Nothing's changed there.

------
gfosco
Doesn't Android provide a license verification service, much like the recently
discussed iTunes receipt validation process? I have an app, GPS Aids, which
checks online if my license is valid. Again, this can be blamed on the
developers, for not taking any reasonable steps to prevent piracy. If the app
has to be cracked, it's going to reduce the piracy rate quite a bit.

As an aside.. I would never pirate a $1 app, that is just ridiculous. I've
spent way more than the average person in the app stores.

~~~
thijser
Yes, and the licensing service is actually one of the most used developer
libraries embedded in Android apps (
<http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev> ), although it's quickly being
overtaken by the free + in-app billing model at the moment.

------
fpgeek
The entire premise is flawed. This developer didn't leave Android. They got
rid of their entry fee to try to make more money via in-app purchase. Despite
the publicity stunt, that is a run-of-the-mill business decision with little
or no wider significance.

------
rythie
Lots of people don't get to work on cool stuff at work, but they get paid and
work in a convenient place for their life situation.

A lot of people have energy to give to open source because they get something
out of it that's not money. Most people who play sports are not paid, or do
art, dance, blog or lots of things really.

If you don't want to work for free, don't, I'm sure someone else who's bored
or wants to sharpen their skills will step and fill the void you left.

------
Mavrik
If I put it the same way the author did: "If you don't like Android's
openness, this is your bus stop."

We don't NEED another iOS... iOS and WP7 is enough.

------
tomp
Not everything in the world is a business model. If Linus was in for the money
20 years ago, the world that we live in would be seriously fucked up (much
more than it is today). Same goes for Google's Android - it's open, it's free.
It's focused on abundance, on sharing.

------
squarecat
Valid or not, the point is undermined by the author's abrasive response to
counterpoint: <https://twitter.com/mattgemmell/status/227818567851180032>

~~~
epaga
I wouldn't call that abrasive. The "counterpoint" was quoting a previous
article of his out of context, acting as if he was saying it was OK to steal
content - which he was not, he was explaining WHY people steal content.

Having your words twisted is definitely insulting.

~~~
squarecat
Twisted implies malicious intent, which the other individuals clearly did not
have.

And, whether you agree with Mr. Gemmell or the other two gentlemen, this was a
misunderstanding at worst and the assertion that the "piece is really
personally insulting" is laughable. (It's probable that he responded out of
frustration, which is only human, but perhaps he could have used the
opportunity to clarify himself.)

------
zzzeek
easy to pirate, extremely open and customizable, designed with 1000% nerd
philosophy at every step, made the author millions: minecraft

~~~
veridies
But that's one (immensely popular) example. It's the very most popular indie
game in the world, or close to it.

------
srathbun
Hmm, if all this is true, then how can any successful company have an open
source software product? Bacula <http://www.bacula.org/en/> is a great backup
solution available fore free, with installers, yet they run a successful
business.

------
beefsack
Where is the evidence to support the claim that the lack of purchases is due
to piracy?

------
excuse-me
"it’s open - with the corrosive mentality that surrounds such openness."

That's must be why Oracle and IBM have never made money supporting their
products on Linux - it's that corrosive mentality of having the core of the
underlying kernel be open source.

~~~
rgsteele
"Existence of some viable open source models doesn’t change the reality for
the vast majority of developers. We don’t have a rich daddy like Mozilla. We
don’t have an operating system for which we can use a paid-support model. We
just want to make apps, then sell enough copies of them so that we can make
some more.

"The only principle that enters into it is that of survival: keeping food on
the table, and making sure the lights stay on. Open doesn’t sit well with
those goals."

~~~
excuse-me
The article seemed to be saying that since android is based on a FOSS kernel,
and FOSS is a cancer (in Balmer's famous words) then people will pirate
Android apps. Of course iOS is based on an essentially public domain BSD
kernel where you are free to copy it all you want.

But you could read it to say, the Google app store is more open than Apple's
restricted/approved walled garden and this allows more pirate apps. The
article isn't very clearly written.

Of course the open access also avoids the many stories we get on here about -
my original app was arbitrarily removed by someone at Apple because they
thought it was the copy of another app - and I can't talk to anyone about it.

