
Inverting the Golden Cage, or a Gift to the Barbarian Hordes at Apple’s Gates. - fogus
http://www.loper-os.org/?p=144
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efsavage
And what's to stop Apple from changing things up again? The most insidious
problem with these walled gardens/lock-in environments is that you don't know
what's coming next.

I got out of MSFT development when I saw that they basically said "all that
stuff you learned and invested in, we've decided to break it, but you can pay
us for the next version and do it all over again!" The VB/VBA programs I wrote
back then are long gone. The C/Perl/Java programs I wrote against standards
still work fine. Sure I might have to make some tweaks if I want to catch up
to the latest version, and some day Oracle will do something stupid to Java
and we'll be stuck with the previous version, but I won't concede retroactive
control over my investment to another company's marketing department.

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drewcrawford
Well to start with, there are patent problems. IANAL, but I presume Apple's
thought long and hard about this.

Then you have the licensing issues. To get the documentation, you need to
clickwrap through the license that says you can't clone it. So it's not even
like cleanroom engineering, where it's possible to legally document some
assembly code you bought in a box.

Then there's the real problem--Apple's SDKs are really quite good, all things
considered. Cloning them would be very hard. There is some serious,
complicated stuff going on under the hood, especially to make it performant.
To say that a couple of clever Lisp hackers can clone it is to say that Apple
could have built the API with a couple of clever hackers to begin with. It's
to say that Jobs is stupid for having hundreds of people work on it.

~~~
stcredzero
What makes you think that hundreds of people are working in the SDK? I suspect
the core frameworks are really only being worked on by small groups.

If one targeted a specific kind of application, let's say 2D gaming, then the
amount of functionality is well within the size of what one or two talented
hackers can do. After all, they wouldn't have to write an SDK. All they have
to do is to write an Objective-C parser and target another 2D game SDK on
another platform.

~~~
drewcrawford
Let's say on average, 2D games only use 20% of the APIs.

Problem: Every 2D game uses a different 20%.

~~~
stcredzero
I don't see it. How do you explain something like PyGlet?

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easp
This is just silly.

I expect Apple would hate it, but not because it would spell their quick
demise.

For one thing, even if such a thing were available today, the iPhone/iPad
would almost certainly be the best platform for apps developed for, well, the
iPhone/iPad platform. Yes, more developers might port their existing iApp to
Android, etc, but if its viable for them, then its also viable for people who
creating new apps who might have bet it all on Android if they didn't have an
easy way to hedge with the iPhone too.

If this idea were real, and it caught on, the bigger issue for Apple is that
developers might be slower to adopt new features of the platform. Right now,
if Apple releases a new OS feature, they can put it on new devices and move
the installed base to it pretty quickly, which means developers have incentive
to take advantage of the new functionality. If those developers depend on a
translation layer to reach a significant portion of their audience, then they
have less incentive to move quickly, because the translation layer needs to be
updated, and that could take a while if the underlying platform doesn't
provide the required functionality yet.

Not that I think it would ever get that far. It's a lot of work already, and
its going to be magnified by the fact that both iPhoneOS and Android are
evolving quickly. Even if this hypothetical were real, its going to be lagging
the capabilities of both platforms which means that its only really attractive
for apps that don't get much benefit from the new capabilities.

Look at WINE. It's been under development for over a decade. I think its
impressive that it is as useful as it is, but when it comes down to it, its
still pretty niche.

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ynniv
Where by "the doom of the Golden Cage as we know it", we actually mean "a
thriving AppStore market"? As far as we can tell, Apple just wants apps to run
well on the iPhone and iPad. If you want to machine translate your CocoaTouch
app into something else, then Apple has in a way won: the conversation is
about how you can port your awesome CocoaTouch app on to some other, lesser
platform. That's all Steve really wants anyway - look at iTunes/Safari for
Windows. As an added bonus, such a translation framework would finally fill
the gap that GNUstep [<http://gnustep.org/>] never did. You might start with
Cocotron [<http://cocotron.org/>], which is a small subset of what the author
describes.

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Avshalom
>For this reason, Adobe (or anyone else who stands to profit from Apple’s
demise) ought to seriously consider funding such a project.

How would getting the entire mobile developer world to code to Apple's API's
lead to Apple's demise?

~~~
ovi256
Well, if you saw a killer app on an iPhone, you could run it on your non-
iPhone smartphone with this approach. Thus no need to buy an iPhone yourself.

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glhaynes
"nor would it be especially difficult given several months of an enthusiastic
Common Lisp programmer or two" Hah!

~~~
hernan7
I guess it depends on your definition of "several".

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mcav
With enough time, money, and energy, we could do a _lot_ of things. This will
never happen.

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stcredzero
Why not? This wouldn't be any more or less difficult than any other cross
platform framework.

~~~
wmf
Think of it as a cross platform framework where _the spec is controlled by
your enemy_.

~~~
stcredzero
They're limited in what they can do if they want to maintain backwards
compatibility.

