Comment by dlikhten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dlikhten | Hacker News Reader

I would like to point out, that regardless of your feelings for either person Jobs or Stallman, both is/was very smart people, and what they say/do we should pay attention to.

Stallman is right about Jobs' legacy. iOS devices prevent installation of any GPL software. This is blatantly wrong. Most innovations within the last 20 years came from OSS developers creating incredible techniques used by Apple/MS/etc, yet this is being attacked. The shoulders of giants analogy perfectly applies. Except OSS developers don't get patents, the thiefs of OSS do.

Unlike Jobs, Stallman's view of the world is towards freedom and I respect him for walking the walk, he is not filthy rich and that is because he does not exploit people. He definitely has views and attitudes that are unpopular, such as his views on reproduction BUT none of those ever take choice away from people, nor do they ever take any freedom away from people.

His prediction of the patent war is true. Look at patents today. MS is taking royalties from 50% of android sales. Apple is preventing sales of tablets because they have round corners and the approximate shape of an iPad, and Intellectual Ventures is getting ready to obliterate companies. The legacy of Steve Jobs is anti-freedom.

"Most innovations within the last 20 years came from OSS developers creating incredible techniques used by Apple/MS/etc..."

Name one.

To take some examples I happen to have first-hand intimacy with: Linux is both original and good, but the original parts are frequently not good, and the good parts are clones of Solaris. Touchscreen happened in iOS first. Modern virtualization happened in VMware's closed-source base first. Modern information retrieval is still a proprietary Google secret.

The most important counter-examples I can think of are languages. The "everything is a hash table" descendants of Perl and javascript (in which I include Python, Ruby, and PHP) would not have been viable as commercial products. That said, even javascript began life as a Netscape proprietary implementation, and Perl is mostly a synthesis of ideas present in ksh.

Touchscreen happened in iOS first.

What? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus is just one counterexample of many.

"Touchscreen that civilians care about."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman

That is not a touchscreen. That is a stylus driven OS. Much like the Newton, which preceded it.

Finger-responsive touchscreens were around long before Apple used them - they were just generally larger than the iphone. Surely you must have seen them somewhere, from museum displays to fast-food cash registers.

The iPhone is not a "finger responsive touch screen". These screens are really easy to make-- they have a grid of sense lines and can tell if there's a finger at the intersection of two of them. They are completely confused if two fingers touch the screen at the same time.

What the iPhone does is map the entire shape of a finger, as well as many other fingers, touching the screen to determine how many fingers, what orientation, etc.

This is completely different. That you and others claim they are the same shows the frank dishonesty at the core of the anti-innovation crowd here on hacker news. I'm at a loss for the motivation of anti-innovation people to hang out on an ostensibly startup oriented site, but you have succeeded in ruining it.

Do not lump PHP with Python and Ruby. It is incredibly rude and betrays a lack of understanding about the pedigree of these languages.

Python predates JavaScript by nearly half a decade.

Perl's big inspirations were sed, grep, and awk, not ksh, according to Larry Wall. However, there is no reason that Larry might not have known about ksh, and it's entirely possible that he was thinking of ksh when he implemented Perl.

I work on a PHP compiler and runtime for a living, so I'm reasonably familiar with its past, present and future. While Ruby and Python are superior in many ways, these three languages (and Perl and JS) have much more in common than they do separating them: Algol syntax, runtime typing, hash-table like duck-typed objects, automatic memory management, some half-baked (for all but JS) concessions to functional style, etc. If you consider them in a world that includes C++, Haskell, Prolog, x64 assembly, Smalltalk, and Lisp, all of these languages form an incredibly tight cluster in the configuration space.

And granting for the sake of argument that Larry Wall wasn't thinking of ksh, sed, grep and awk were just as AT&T proprietary as ksh was.

Ruby and Python have strong types, no automatic coercion besides numeric promotion, customizable and extensible type models, the ability to create new first-class types, a complete type system, dynamic attribute and method dispatch; these things are not in the flavors of ECMAScript used in browsers and Node, to the point where there is no "class" keyword, or an equivalent, in JS.

I object to Ruby and Python being lumped with JS mostly on account of features, and additionally because JS does not occupy the same systems-programming niche that Ruby and Python can easily fill. (And some companies, like Google, would not permit Ruby and Python to be grouped, nor Python with C++ and Java.)

Edit: Nevermind, you're right. I concede.

> cluster in the configuration space

10 bits of evidence that you read LessWrong. (Sorry, couldn't help it.)

Without disagreeing with you about their overall similarity, your claim that "descendants of Perl and javascript ... include Python, Ruby, and PHP" is obviously mistaken. Maybe you meant "descendents of Perl and Python include JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP". Just a question of historical accuracy.

Either way, this nit-picking doesn't affect your main claim that most revolutionary technologies came from closed companies, and that languages seem to be the main exception.

In response to that main point, it seems to me that in a lot of cases, the amazing closed-source technologies are actually rooted in technologies developed in the open, before FLOSS had a name (indeed, before AT&T's crackdown pushed RMS to coin Free Software). Consider the success of Unix: initial development by a closed not-for-profit lab, and elaborated by an informal open process. Consider the open and collaborative processes that gave us all sorts of networking technologies, including TCP/IP, including hypertext, etc. And Javascript would have died in a ghetto if it had been limited to one company's browser.

AT&T may have invented these, but the versions everyone uses are the GNU ones.

VMware was probably based on M Rosenblum's graduate work on SimOS, which was GPL.

If it's fair to call Perl "mostly a synthesis ideas present in ksh," I think it would also be fair to call Mac OSX "BSD plus a display server driven by postscript and a UI written in Objective C."

> VMware was probably based on M Rosenblum's graduate work on SimOS, which was GPL.

I worked on VMware's virtual machine monitor from 2000 to 2009. Mendel's students' work on SimOS had nothing at all to do with VMware, full-stop; SimOS was just a full-system simulator, useful for measurement and educational purposes, which has almost nothing to do with virtualization.

The research system of Mendel's that did influence VMware's founding was Disco[0], a virtual machine monitor for SGI's MIPS machines. But the technique Disco used (trap-and-emulate) was inapplicable on x86, and in fact there was peer-reviewed literature claiming the x86 was impossible to virtualize[1]. VMware's first six years of products were instead based on dynamic binary translation; we incrementally recompiled the privileged x86 guest into unprivileged x86 code, in much the same way modern JVMs incrementally compile Java bytecodes into native machine instructions. Our source base was 100% VMware proprietary, and had to be since no open source project was trying anything remotely related at the time.

[0] http://www-flash.stanford.edu/~bugnion/Disco/sosp-html/ [1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1251316&dl=ACM&col....

About as fair as calling an Indy Car a Buckboard with an engine instead of a horse. Perl and OS X are quite a bit more.

Python is in no sense an everything-is-a-hashtable language.

"The default behavior for attribute access is to get, set, or delete the attribute from an object’s dictionary. For instance, a.x has a lookup chain starting with a.__dict__['x'], then type(a).__dict__['x'], and continuing through the base classes of type(a) excluding metaclasses."

http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#invoking-des...

* rpm, dpkg, apt-get finally killed dll hell

* Various UI improvements: customizable panel widgets, multi-desktop pagers, ..

* git and other dvcs's

* qemu (virtualization through dynamic recompilation)

* gcc extensions

* gdb: reversible debugging

More?

Touchscreen was invented in a government funded university research lab, not iOS.

" iOS devices prevent installation of any GPL software."

In what way? It is the GPL that prevents GPL software from being distributed via the App Store. Frankly, I see no reason why it should be a problem, as the binary distributed that way could easily link to a web page with the source.... but I remember a bunch of "Free" software types raising a stink when someone uploaded a GPLed App.

Apple doesn't care, so long as it isn't using private APIs, or stealing users data, or contain malware, etc.

You guys never seem to give Apple honest credit for what it does. For instance, before the App Store, independant software developers could not get apps on mobile devices, because the carriers controlled the ecosystem. Apple opened it up and made it a level playing field and now there are hundreds of startups targeting the mobile device market. Google didn't do that, Google just copied it. It was Apple that used its clout to force the carriers to accept the AppStore.

There is no reason why you should even have to ask Apple to install software on a device you own. iOS is a jail operating system.

I install whatever software I want on my iPhone, and I don't have to ask Apple before I do it. I can install software with any license I want- apache, GPL, whatever. And I haven't jailbroken my phone.

You're shifting the goalposts. Stallman is complaining about the AppStore which is where Apple sells software and Apple chooses not to sell pornography. That's their choice.

Any consumer, with an iPhone that is not jailbroken, can install whatever software they want, provided it is written in HTML and javascript. The iPhone is a totally open, standards based, host, and Apple exercises no control over it. You can even go visit porn sites.

Further, Apple has worked to make this platform a first rate citizen in its operating system. HTML/Javascript Apps can be installed, added to the home screen, can have local data, and can run when there is no network connection, and they can do absolutely whatever you want.

> Any consumer, with an iPhone that is not jailbroken, can install whatever software they want, provided it is written in HTML and javascript.

That is the exact, very definition of "not any software they want".

> Further, Apple has worked to make this platform a first rate citizen in its operating system.

Too bad that in order to make it interact with my own computer, I have to install a proprietary, disgusting program with locked-down protocols.

I'm an iOS developer & a fan of the app store system (from the small indie developers point of view), but there is no way I can kid myself that iOS is an open platform.

Javascript & HTML are very nice inclusions, but really unless you can run arbitrary native code on the device I don't think it counts.

What are you smoking?

So what? Don't use it.

I don't, but I fully agree with Stallman that the fact that it accustoms people to the notion that they shouldn't expect to have complete control over hardware they own is a very, very wrong path to take.

Of course, like most of the things Stallman is right about, it's the kind of thing you don't notice until it actually affects you.

If you, Stallman and whoever are talking about what people learn (I.e. they don't have complete control over hardware) it is near entirely useless to speak of those who do so.

Assuming everything Stallman holds dear to his beard is true and will benefit everyone, with effective teaching (So, people understand the idea, see why it would benefit and are able toact) people would begin to change.

Lambasting Apple, Microsoft and whoever is such a petty way to go about this and shows a certain lack of trust in their own ideas.

Steve Jobs showed more trust in his own ideas. He [and others he worked with] went ahead, built something, and people now use it. Jobs and friends seemed less worried about others and whatever their ideas and products were which seems to be the opposite of Stallman, companies, groups, etc.

"There are those who always speak of themselves, and they are either insecure or proud. There are those who always speak of others. They are usually very boring. There are those who speak of stirring ideas, compelling books, and inspiring doctrine. These are the few who make their mark in this world."

Yeah, that's the whole point of this topic.

your "etc" glosses over a lot of other reasons apple will reject your app, ranging from "we're not going to tell you why" all the way up to "your superior implementation makes our built in functionality look dumb, so we'll ban your app to prevent users from getting confused."

Apple does not reject Apps without citing chapter and verse in the standards book, and often providing screenshots.

I'm not aware of any examples of the latter, but since the App Store has been created, there have been no manner of false stories from Apple bashers along these lines.

Here's a concrete one: Firefox Mobile exists for Android devices, but iOS users have to settle for "Firefox Home", an app which provides access to your Firefox bookmarks and lets you open them with Safari.

The App Store terms of service add additional restrictions on what you can do with the software you get through it: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-...

"In what way? It is the GPL that prevents GPL software from being distributed via the App Store. Frankly, I see no reason why it should be a problem, as the binary distributed that way could easily link to a web page with the source...."

The whole point of the GPL is that wherever GPL-covered software goes, the freedoms (to run, study, modify, and distribute the software) go with it. Availability of source code isn't the goal; it's just a necessary condition. Because iOS devices will only run code signed by Apple's keys (and Apple doesn't distribute those keys, obviously), it's impossible for a developer to distribute software via the App Store without separating the software from the freedoms. That's why it's not allowed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com