You seem to be under the impression that phones once were free & loose, and then Apple locked them down. Phones never were free - carriers controlled what went on them, and what features were used. Apple opened devices up to a level never before seen - no more carrier crap pre-loaded, and a serious push to improve data pipes and 3G availability throughout North America. Not to mention an app marketplace NOT controlled by the carriers, and an web browsing experience that doesn't require you to be snooped on by WAP gateways.
Do you not still see the (baseless) grief Apple gets from carriers about how their phones are "data hogs"? Or how the media breathlessly claims the retina display is going to clog up all of our bandwidth from higher resolution video and pictures?
Phones were always locked down heavily, Apple blew up that up to a large extent, but not completely, of course, as they are in business.... But today's variety of walled gardens are mostly untouchable by the carriers.
> Apple's restrictions are all about controlling device owners to make Apple more money. (Otherwise they would be "suggestions".)
No, the restrictions are all about curating an experience. Suggestions require choice. Most people don't want to make choices on how their phones work, they want to be handed experience with most decisions made for them, and for popular variations to be tweakable. "Opinionated software".
> You may not install apps that don't pay Apple 30% of their revenues.
Well, yes, they are capitalists, shame on them.
> You may not install apps that compete with Apple's favored apps.
That sucked, I agree, but that's changing. Chrome is out for iOS. Alternative Email clients are out. Apple generally is known for good customer service according to most customer satisfaction surveys, and presuming these people are semi-rational beings, that usually implies Apple actually listens to them (eventually).
> I'm saying freedom doesn't what you think it means, and I don't think even Frank Luntz could make it mean that.
You seem to be confusing political freedom with freedom to violate others' property.
Firstly, you do realize that you have political freedom -- people are completely free to jailbreak their phones, no police will come after you. If you violate your carrier's T&Cs they can fire you as a customer, but that's due to years of historically poor regulation of telecom in the USA.
Secondly, none of the software you use, that you haven't written, is owned by you. All owners of that software have a restriction on your behaviour with that software, including free or open source software. You have never been completely free when you use software. Thus, degree of openness is just a feature. Apple is trying to find a balance that people care about. Naturally developers & technical folks don't like losing the freedom to tinker, while most people couldn't care less. Apple needs to maintain a developer community that tinkers, though. So it's a balancing act.
There are ways to offer predefined paths for those people that don't care about choice without taking away choice from everyone. Apple has completely failed at providing this because they're hungry for control and want to impose their will upon their customers. Ideally all people that use computers.
>Firstly, you do realize that you have political freedom -- people are completely free to jailbreak their phones, no police will come after you
Apple wanted to make jailbreaking illegal and were stopped by the USG. They wanted police to come after you, but apparently you don't remember that part.
> Secondly, none of the software you use, that you haven't written, is owned by you
There's a huge difference between not owning software and still controlling it because it's your machine and not owning software and being out of luck because Apple can remote-delete it.
> There are ways to offer predefined paths for those people that don't care about choice without taking away choice from everyone. Apple has completely failed at providing this because they're hungry for control and want to impose their will upon their customers. Ideally all people that use computers.
And their customers are thanking them for it. Apple's control is primarily about improving the overall experience of the user, and secondarily about extracting as much revenue as they can from the platform they created. Seems like a good tradeoff to iOS users (for now).
I completely agree there should be competitive alternatives to Apple's approach. My point is that openness is a feature, and the market should decide the level of openness that matters. So far the market seems to support the theory that a general purpose computing model like the PC world does not suit the mobile device world.
> There's a huge difference between not owning software and still controlling it because it's your machine and not owning software and being out of luck because Apple can remote-delete it.
And if they abuse that trust, they'll lose customers.
You're working from the assumption that openness (and by extension freedom, privacy) are features, but they're more than that.
They are essential human needs and the market can not be relied upon to provide them, they must be enforced. Convenience is very alluring and freedom is very difficult. Most people will choose convenience, that I already know - what is extremely important is that there is always a Free option available and that corporations like Apple are mercilessly criticized whenever they fail to uphold the ideals of openness.
You can relax and think the market will look out for your rights and you'll wake up with your hands tied behind your back parasubvert. These "tradeoffs" always seem nice until you're trapped.
You are absolutely right that is my assumption. I do not believe software openness is an ideal or moral position. It's an economic feature, through and through, in my opinion. I am a big supporter of open source for the economic benefits, but I do not subscribe to the FSF philosophy of freedom.
But the act of copying, distributing, or modifying said software is restricted. Much more so than, say, the Apache license. Those are behaviours too.
The GPL controls you "in your own interests", or to quote them:
> To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.
The point is that you don't own the software you run, the owner has a claim on your freedom. In GPL's case it's for what they feel is the greater good (more free software, and limited free-loading).
Well, so does a law that prevents you from selling your labor as a slave, but I don't think you would see that as bad.
For the fact of 'owning' the software... well, as long as you don't redistribute it, who cares. And if you do restribute it, why should you take away from your users the same freedom that was given to you? (by making your software proprietary or by limiting the use they can make)
What does slavery have to do with this? There's ample discussions over the past 10 years over why many people disagree with the approach the GPL takes as being too restrictive and freedom-restricting, and not actually in the spirit of "open". I don't have to even argue that, it's been done before ad nauseum. Of course many support the GPL and it's approach. The point on GPL is that "freedom is a feature", it's all in the eye of the beholder of what's more important - free to use & redistribute, or free to use but only redistribute under certain circumstances. The choice has massive implications for people using that software - I've seen many a review of weeding all GPLv3 or AGPL dependencies out of a product for this very reason.
The original point is that Cory seems to think that protecting user's freedoms first requires securing device owner's freedoms, though the two come into conflict regularly, and he doesn't have clear answers of how to resolve that. I'm suggesting that he's not looking at ownership broadly enough.
Fair enough, as you say it's in the eye of the beholder.
What I'd like is a precise use of terms. Saying (as most do) that GPL is restrictive is imprecise. As you better put it, GPL is restrictive on redistribution.
As for ownership, I'd like you to expand on what you think about it. As you say Cory didn't look broadly enough, so I'd like to read further opinions about it.
Good point, it strikes me that with the changing landscape perhaps Eric Raymond and others who claim "open source" has won and we no longer need "free software" may want to rethink that.
Those were still basically locked down on the phone/baseband part, with a PDA glued on. They weren't anywhere near as closely coupled as today's smartphones.
The applications didn't have API access to anything "phonelike" about the phone; it was just a PDA glued onto a phone. You could write your own PDA apps, but nothing really interesting.
Most of the applications were far more advanced that what you find on the iPhone and Android (at least until recently after pouring years of development into iOs and Android) - there's no way you can disqualify the PDA apps as being "not really interesting", and you had access to phone functions through the development environment. Of course, there was no accelerator, no multi-touch screen, no GPS, so a number of functions were missing but the software part was advanced and very capable. That was when the iPod was big as a brick and could not run any application, for your information.
What platform or apps are you talking about? I remember WinCE (Compaq Ipaq) which I hacked to run Linux, but I only ever had the PDA form of those, and it was essentially a small laptop (ipaq + cradle + 4GB HDD on CF card + metricom ricochet modem), and the Handspring (PalmOS) things. Nothing on PalmOS was particularly advanced. WinCE did have a lot of desktop-app-ports, but I didn't know anyone actually used them.
I used applications on WinCE - I had a Toshiba PDA. I cannot remember all the application names, but SPB was one of the key developpers for the platforms and their organizer/calendar/scheduler apps (Spb Calendar if I remember correctly) was much better than what you could find on iOS or Android until recently. There were also applications that could open and edit actual word documents and excel sheets (forgot the name) which worked pretty well for tweaking existing files.
The main drawback was the lack of a good browser - these were the days before firefox/chromium so there were no real alternatives out there.
But I had Skype running to call people YEARS before any smartphone could do it. Smartphones were just catching up to what the original PDAs were capable of doing, basically.
An iPad is not a phone. An iPod Touch is not a phone. Even on phones, many, maybe most, aspects of the lockdown have nothing to do with carriers' interests. Apple has decided it likes being like a carrier; its relation to users has changed from computer company to jealous boyfriend.
(I'm not getting involved beyond your first paragraph.)
There is a spectrum of openness when it comes to computing devices. At one end you have computers that are very open, with all of the problems that come with that, and at the other extreme you have fixed-function devices such as printers. In between, you have things like game consoles, smartphones, and other mobile devices.
iDevices are more closed than computers, sure, but they are much more open than say a Nintendo DS, whose SDK costs an order of magnitude more than iOS devlopment. This is as it should be, as iDevices are more flexible than a games console.
Viewed as a continuum of openness, Apple's products seem to me to be exactly where you would expect them to be. You could argue that they should be alittle more open, some even argue that they should be more closed, but overall their success in the market would seem to bear out the theory that they are roughly in the right spot.
This claim (that there's a big niche for curated computing with one central curator) would sway me a little if it weren't for all the patent litigation. And the really strong network effects in OS adoption.
Where I'd expect them to be: no correlation a priori between whether a computer has a multitouch interface and whether its own owner can choose what software to run.
"Phones never were free - carriers controlled what went on them"
This is only relevant for USA, not the rest of the world. All around the globe you could walk into a store, buy any phone you wanted, buy a carrier's SIM and insert into that.
So the Apple model is a kind of dropback.
Do you not still see the (baseless) grief Apple gets from carriers about how their phones are "data hogs"? Or how the media breathlessly claims the retina display is going to clog up all of our bandwidth from higher resolution video and pictures?
Phones were always locked down heavily, Apple blew up that up to a large extent, but not completely, of course, as they are in business.... But today's variety of walled gardens are mostly untouchable by the carriers.
> Apple's restrictions are all about controlling device owners to make Apple more money. (Otherwise they would be "suggestions".)
No, the restrictions are all about curating an experience. Suggestions require choice. Most people don't want to make choices on how their phones work, they want to be handed experience with most decisions made for them, and for popular variations to be tweakable. "Opinionated software".
> You may not install apps that don't pay Apple 30% of their revenues.
Well, yes, they are capitalists, shame on them.
> You may not install apps that compete with Apple's favored apps.
That sucked, I agree, but that's changing. Chrome is out for iOS. Alternative Email clients are out. Apple generally is known for good customer service according to most customer satisfaction surveys, and presuming these people are semi-rational beings, that usually implies Apple actually listens to them (eventually).
> I'm saying freedom doesn't what you think it means, and I don't think even Frank Luntz could make it mean that.
You seem to be confusing political freedom with freedom to violate others' property.
Firstly, you do realize that you have political freedom -- people are completely free to jailbreak their phones, no police will come after you. If you violate your carrier's T&Cs they can fire you as a customer, but that's due to years of historically poor regulation of telecom in the USA.
Secondly, none of the software you use, that you haven't written, is owned by you. All owners of that software have a restriction on your behaviour with that software, including free or open source software. You have never been completely free when you use software. Thus, degree of openness is just a feature. Apple is trying to find a balance that people care about. Naturally developers & technical folks don't like losing the freedom to tinker, while most people couldn't care less. Apple needs to maintain a developer community that tinkers, though. So it's a balancing act.