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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

The comments in here are weird. HN is normally an advocate for open protocols (like Mastodon, XMPP) and has been highly critical of services closing their integrations with 3rd party clients (like Reddit and Twitter).

Yet the moment it’s an Apple protocol, suddenly none of the above matters.

I remember the late 90s / early 00s when we had MSN, AOL IM, ICQ and others. People got so fed up with different people using different services that a whole slew of 3rd party clients were available that supported everything. Like Pidgin, libpurple, Bitlbee (an IRC server that supported IM protocols), and Trinity (or something named like that).

Now we are stuck with vendor lockouts and crappy 1st party apps that are usually little more than a web container.

It’s weird how open source has taken over the world and yet our messaging protocols have gotten more proprietary than ever.

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There’s a ton of open protocols that could have been the messaging standard. But beeper took a always-closed protocol and tried to open it.

I’m not in support of Apple here but it’s pretty obvious which way this would go.

Beeper doesn’t have any control over the protocol Apple implement. They do have control over whether they reverse engineer that protocol.

Beeper could have come up with a new messaging app for iOS. They didn’t have to reverse-engineer iMessage.

> Beeper could have come up with a new messaging app for iOS.

But the point of Beeper was to bring iOS compatibility to non-Apple devices. There’s a literal XKCD comic about creating new standards.

> They didn’t have to reverse-engineer iMessage.

Sure. But that’s not a reason not to do something. The literal same remark can be used against Apple too:

“Apple didn’t need to break support for Beeper”

“Apple didn’t need to make iMessage proprietary”

Etc

For what it’s worth, I’m not against Apple per se. In fact I’m typing this on an iPhone. I’m just commenting about how locked in messaging has become and how it’s weird that people are ok with that (or more precisely, only ok with it when it’s an Apple protocol).

I’m just not sure what your point is? That beeper should just be allowed to do this, just because they wanted to?

I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m an Apple user and I don’t really use iMessage deep enough to have issues talking to Android users.

I’ve just seen Beeper being incredibly entitled about another company’s service that they’re not paying for throughout this whole process.

As a previous startup founder and a developer (which is HN’s primary user-base), I just think it was obvious which way this was going to go.

And saying that making a service closed is equitable to reverse-engineering said service is a weird take. Should every non-public service be allowed to be attacked like this?

Honestly, I’m not sure I have a point. I was just commenting on what I’ve observed as a double standard on here.

If I were to comment on the Beeper thing specifically, I think they were wrong to make it a commercial project (something they’ve now rectified). But I think Apple are wrong to break Beeper too (though I get why they did).

I think there is enough blame to go round to all parties involved.

Ok, that's fair. But what should Apple do in response? If they did not break it the first time, Beeper would be making $2-3/month off of their services.

It would have also shown that Apple's platform isn't as secure as they position themselves to be if someone other than them can utilize their services without their permission.

There was no winning move here for Apple except to close access off to secure their closed protocol. It was just inevitable at that point.

Is it really a security problem though? Something can be secure and support 3rd party clients. More likely this is just a walled garden problem. Because if it was just a security problem then Apple would have released a 1st party iMessage app for Android before now.

This doesn't answer your question though. I guess what I'd have liked to have seen is Apple release a public iMessage API. I know that would never happen, but one can dream. The approach Apple took was certainly predictable. I have no sympathy for Beeper either.

You can write this comment without the weird HN meta the guidelines ask you to skip and it would be a much better comment.

My comment is about what I believe to be a double standard in what was a popular comment in this thread. It's not a meta argument because it's directly responding to the comments being made that are Beeper are in the wrong / Apple are in the right and it would be hard for me to make that point without, well, referencing those comments :)

In my view it has been a very one sided discussion and I wanted to shine a light on that fact. It definitely isn't a sneer at the wider community (I mean why would I? as a prolific commenter myself, I'd be tarring myself with that same brush!)

So I do not believe I'm breaking any of the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

I do want to shine a light on one of the guidelines though:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

I appreciate your comment is well intentioned but it's not taking my post in good faith.

It might be about that but that kind of about is off topic on HN as you can see in the guidelines and numerous moderator comments. It strictly turns reasonable comments into bad comments which end up getting moderated.

If you want to respond to a comment, respond to the comment. If you want to write about some broad sentiment, just write about it without attributing it to the forum or thread as a whole, it avoids all the tangential umbrage and counterumbrage.

> It might be about that but that kind of about is off topic on HN as you can see in the guidelines and numerous moderator comments.

I don't see any moderator comments. Though isn't Daniel (dang) the only mod left since Scott departed?

> If you want to write about some broad sentiment, just write about it without attributing it to the forum or thread as a whole, it avoids all the tangential umbrage and counterumbrage.

I do appreciate your point of view, I honestly do. But it feels the only issue you take from my comment was that it had two letters in it: "HN". I could write my comment in a way that infers the subjects without saying "HN" but it wouldn't change anything about the tone nor content of the post. So I don't agree with your interpretation of the guidelines on this occasion because Hacker News isn't like Voldemort -- it's ok to say "HN" in a comment on HN. You just can't be derogatory about the HN community, which I wasn't. And the high quality of the discourse that followed should demonstrate that.

Anyway I don't wish this to become a tangent. Perhaps it's better to agree to disagree. Your point is valuable generally speaking though. That much I do completely agree with you on.

You can search by:dang sneer and by:dang meta to find lots of relevant comments. As to 'it's just the letters HN', I don't see how that's a reasonable interpretation of anything I wrote.

This is meta, it's sneery, it's an inaccurate thing to write about any threads since threads change quickly and it's not particularly meaningful since the forum is big enough to contain multitudes of conflicting viewpoints at different times. It's the stuff that gets comments deranked. If you have trouble finding exact moderation comments to that effect, you can email the mods and ask.

With the greatest of respect to yourself, and I know your comments here are well intentioned, but I think you’re the bigger rule breaker in this discussion.

You’re off topic and you’re not reading comments charitably (I was not being sneery, as I’ve said repeatedly already). If you have an issue with my comment then downvote it or flag it. That’s what you’re supposed to do as per the guidelines.

Again, I know your comments are well intentioned but I absolutely do not agree with your interpretation here. I think you’re twisting my comments unfavourably and creating meta arguments from them rather than using the peer review systems in place. Which is ironic because you’re breaking those very guidelines you’re trying to uphold.

So let’s just agree to disagree please. Because you are no more of an authority to dictate who’s right or wrong here than I am and arguing with me about those guidelines is absolutely not what you’re supposed to do as part of those guidelines.

It might seem weird to you, because most of what you’re talking about are false equivalencies.

> The comments in here are weird. HN is normally an advocate for open protocols (like Mastodon, XMPP) and has been highly critical of services closing their integrations with 3rd party clients (like Reddit and Twitter).

You’re comparing companies who had open and public APIs and then closed them, with one that was never open to begin with. Apple didn’t suddenly tell hundreds of third party developers to pound sand, they made a thing for themselves and never pretended it to be something different.

> Yet the moment it’s an Apple protocol, suddenly none of the above matters.

Again, that’s not because it’s suddenly about Apple. It is because it’s an entirely different premise.

Generally HN and others with similar expertise will applaud hacking and tweaking things for the sake of hacking and tweaking things. If you’d want to do a deeper analysis on it, I’d say it’s primarily applauding the skills that are at display.

This, however, was a bit different. For starters Beeper tried to monetize it, it being someone else’s services and resources.

While many are put off by monetization, no manner the skills involved on the basic premise that it loses its “rebellious” and “counterculture” edge, even more are put off by recurring monetization schemes. Add to that the fact that it is recurring monetization of empty air (or Apple’s resources if you will) and you lose even more people.

Then there’s a subset that simply is of the mindset that they can recognize accomplishments but don’t condone subsequent usage of said accomplishments in the manner Beeper tried to do as opposed to individuals doing it themselves in a grassroots way.

There are also many that fall within a spectrum of all of the above. I don’t speak for all of these people, I’m merely attempting to describe the mindset of some people here on HN and the subsequent lack of incongruity you seem to think exists here.

> I remember the late 90s / early 00s when we had MSN, AOL IM, ICQ and others. People got so fed up with different people using different services that a whole slew of 3rd party clients were available that supported everything. Like Pidgin, libpurple, Bitlbee (an IRC server that supported IM protocols), and Trinity (or something named like that).

I can be wrong here, but I don’t recall any of those efforts trying to charge people $2/mo for using their creation. That alone makes this situation not analogous. Another would be that the ones I recognize from your list were licensed under FOSS licenses, as opposed to being the pet project of a SaaS startup.

> Now we are stuck with vendor lockouts and crappy 1st party apps that are usually little more than a web container.

iMessage clients on iOS and macOS aren’t web containers and are more and more becoming fully native SwiftUI projects so I fail to see the relevance of that remark. As for vendor lockouts, you say that as if it’s a dirty thing.

Personally I take more issue with something that was open and then squeezed shut after everyone’s inside, less so with things that were closed off from the get go and people still adopted it despite that fact, provided later down the line, after significant growth, there wasn’t an abuse of power.

> It’s weird how open source has taken over the world and yet our messaging protocols have gotten more proprietary than ever.

What’s weirder, to me anyways, is that you talk about open source as if it’s a staple value for you, yet here you are carrying water for commercial SaaS startup. Comparing their efforts to the likes of those who created Pidgin and libpurple.

> What’s weirder, to me anyways, is that you talk about open source as if it’s a staple value for you, yet here you are carrying water for commercial SaaS startup. Comparing their efforts to the likes of those who created Pidgin and libpurple.

Beeper has done a ton of open source work on matrix bridges, both themselves and through sponsoring other developers. I don't see how it's out of place to compare them to libpurple devs at all.

Be that as it may, the Beeper mini client wasn’t licensed under a FOSS license and they tried to monetize it with a monthly recurring subscription.

And by the looks of it, many of their matrix bridges were created by their, now Lead Architect, before they joined Beeper. Those are under GPL so Beeper doesn’t has much choice but to keep them open source.

So it’s kind of like me bragging about doing good for society by virtue of me paying my taxes.

Okay, so? Are you implying they would make the bridges closed source if they could? Then why do they still maintain the open source bridges instead of forking or writing their own, and why do they sponsor devs to make new open source bridges instead of contracting them to create closed source ones, and why do they dump a bunch of money into the matrix foundation with no immediate benefit to their business? Not sure why it's so hard to believe that people might try to support themselves while improving the open source ecosystem.

Yes, the clients (both beeper mini and beeper cloud) are closed source. That's their business model - open source bridges that anyone can run if they wanted, then they just make it more convenient if you use their services by hosting it all for you and giving a nice polished client. The comparison was to libpurple devs - bridges are the equivalent of libpurple. This is like if libpurple devs decided to write a closed source client based on libpurple and then charge for it. Sounds good to me if it lets them keep working on the open source stuff.

MSN and AIM were not open or public APIs

AOL / ICQ's proprietary Protocol (ICQ moved to it after being acquired by AOL): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol

I don't really care to look up the details of MSN, but at the time Microsoft was not "open" friendly by any means.

> You’re comparing companies who had open and public APIs and then closed them, with one that was never open to begin with.

I don’t see that as a false equivalency. Plus AOL IM, MSN and ICQ weren’t open either.

> I can be wrong here, but I don’t recall any of those efforts trying to charge people $2/mo for using their creation.

There’s been plenty of 3rd party clients for Twitter and Reddit that weren’t free. They were seen as the good guys when those apps broke after Twitter and Reddit decided they didn’t want 3rd party app support.

> iMessage clients on iOS and macOS aren’t web containers

I agree but iMessage is the exception in that regard. Pretty much every other messaging app on iOS and Android (and even desktop applications too) are little more than Electron or web views.

> What’s weirder, to me anyways, is that you talk about open source as if it’s a staple value for you

It’s not. My comment there was that Android, iOS and macOS are all built upon open source technologies. Yet things are more closed than ever. I just find that a little ironic.

> This, however, was a bit different. For starters Beeper tried to monetize it, it being someone else’s services and resources.

I saved this to the end because I do actually completely agree with you on this. At least they’ve done the right thing now and open sourced Beeper. But it should never have been a commercial product to begin with.

> I don’t see that as a false equivalency.

To me and perhaps others, those elements matter when making a comparison, so it seems we’ll disagree on how equivalent the examples are.

> Plus AOL IM, MSN and ICQ weren’t open either.

I was replying to the examples of Twitter and Reddit you gave. AIM, MSN and ICQ weren’t amongst your examples, presumably because they’re not equivalent to Twitter and Reddit (open to third parties and then not anymore).

But I feel I’ve covered the initiatives “against” AIM, MSN and ICQ and why I think they’re not equivalent to Beeper extensively enough further down that comment.

> There’s been plenty of 3rd party clients for Twitter and Reddit that weren’t free. They were seen as the good guys when those apps broke after Twitter and Reddit decided they didn’t want 3rd party app support.

So now we’re going from one false equivalency to another?

Perhaps it helps if I break it down. The players on the board are:

A) Grassroots selfless non-profit initiatives vs. corporations, the former having the goal to enrich community as a whole instead of enriching themselves

B) Small for-profit indie developers + grassroots non-profit selfless initiatives which tried to help people with disabilities to participate in online discourse + well as researchers trying to contribute to general knowledge who all were paying a fee for API usage commensurate with market value and financial capabilities vs. corporations who in actuality wanted to kill third party API access but instead of outright saying that and doing so, instead decided to hike their prices to ridiculous astronomical levels in a surprise with not enough time to even digest the changes, all while making duplicitous comments throughout even going as far as reassuring developers right before, only to follow it up with derogatory comments and in one case defamation and utter disrespect to both the affected developers, the people with disabilities that got excluded and their everyday users l, and all but ensuring the death of both third party apps (if not outright bankrupting them) as well as grassroots projects for the benefit of the community as whole

C) A for-profit SaaS startup using fake credentials to receive authentication blobs, violating the CFAA’s computer trespass statutes by accessing another corporation’s servers unauthorized and facilitating unauthorized access by third parties with goal of selling the other corporation’s services for $2/mo

A) came about without any profit motives and in cases, like Pidgin, didn’t even involve reverse engineering[0], but were created with public documents and even help from people of the company they were trying to connect to[1]. Let alone spoofing credentials to circumvent authentication. They weren’t owed anything, but were being selfless

B) Has mostly to do with poorly treating paying customers, closing up something that was open, having benefitted from third parties’ work to grow, and even then the “normie” backlash only really gained traction after abysmal and unprofessional communication by the people in charge at Reddit and Twitter. They were owed something (at the very least decency) but didn’t get it, with a small portion being selfless.

C) Is mainly a company trying to make a buck, wrapping it in some moral stance and feeding it to the masses. They weren’t owed anything and acted wronged.

A, B and C are not comparable in the slightest. All three are wholly different scenarios.

> It’s not. My point was that Android, iOS and macOS are all built upon open source technologies. Yet things are more closed than ever. my point was just that it’s ironic.

I guess I misread what you were going for. I feel the opposite. Granted I haven’t looked into this, and perhaps this is because repos are more readily accessible than ever, but I have the feeling there’s more open source stuff available than ever before.

So much so that 9/10 when I’m thinking of creating something because “it would be so darn handy to have” I check if someone beat me to it and often times this ends up being the case and there’s a GitHub repo available with a permissive license that does the very thing I was about to waste my time on.

> I saved this to the end because I do actually completely agree with you on this. At least they’ve done the right thing now and open sourced Beeper. But it should never have been a commercial product to begin with.

It seems we can at least agree on some things. That said, I was mainly trying to explain why people on HN might not be fully on Beeper’s side.

Personally I thought it was a pretty cool little workaround they bought (pypush), but didn’t think it was smart of them to try and sell it.

As illogical it might sounds, if this was just a DIY thing for people to do themselves then I would’ve probably leaned more towards Apple being petty by trying to block it. But by it being a company doing it and trying to profit off of it, I immediately skewed more against Beeper.

In particular because I saw the writing on the wall. Not only of Apple mitigating it, but the subsequent “woe is me” by Beeper as well. Whereas I’m more of the mentality that if you’re gonna fuck around like this, at least take it on the chin if it doesn’t work out.

But that’s just me I guess.

0: https://web.archive.org/web/19990210175349/http://www.marko....

1: https://archive.ph/2012.12.08-193508/http://www.forbes.com/2...

> I was replying to the examples of Twitter and Reddit you gave. AIM, MSN and ICQ weren’t amongst your examples,

Yes they were

> So now we’re going from one false equivalency to another? Perhaps it helps if I break it down. The players on the board are: [...] Pidgin [etc]

I'm not talking about FOSS when I say "There’s been plenty of 3rd party clients for Twitter and Reddit that weren’t free."

Apollo is a great example of a paid 3rd party app that HN were sympathetic to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36312122

> I guess I misread what you were going for. I feel the opposite. Granted I haven’t looked into this, and perhaps this is because repos are more readily accessible than ever, but I have the feeling there’s more open source stuff available than ever before.

I agree there is. And commercial operating systems are taking advantage of that too. Yet our walled gardens are more restrictive than ever. Messaging protocols are more locked down than ever (libpurple is a pale shell of what it used to be, Facebook and Google used to use XMPP). There's ongoing legal disputes about Apple's App Store and how restrictive that is. Windows and macOS both treat any unsigned 3rd party programs as suspicious. Our hardware itself is become more locked down than ever too.

It's a better story on desktop Linux for sure. But I'm stuck with Android and iOS for phones because building a FOSS handset is almost impossible (and I've tried!). Even the hardware on modern phones are full of closed binary firmware, SoCs and closed Linux drivers.

But I digress. My original complaint was the, in my view, double standard happening about people shouting for greater openness yet also supporting Apple in locking out 3rd party iMessage clients.

> Personally I thought it was a pretty cool little workaround they bought (pypush), but didn’t think it was smart of them to try and sell it.

> As illogical it might sounds, if this was just a DIY thing for people to do themselves then I would’ve probably leaned more towards Apple being petty by trying to block it. But by it being a company doing it and trying to profit off of it, I immediately skewed more against Beeper.

> In particular because I saw the writing on the wall. Not only of Apple mitigating it, but the subsequent “woe is me” by Beeper as well. Whereas I’m more of the mentality that if you’re gonna fuck around like this, at least take it on the chin if it doesn’t work out.

Yeah I completely agree with you regarding Beeper. That said, I don't think that should really change things on Apple's side. It just means both parties are at fault rather than it being a hero vs villain story. I guess I just view this debacle as more nuanced than a lot of the comments on here would like to claim. People are definitely picking sides but, personally, I don't think either company has come out of this looking particularly great.

Your comment is the one that’s weird. HN is not a hive mind, and hacker news itself is a proprietary site that doesn’t implement any open standards or protocols.

Even if we accept your faulty premise, the solution would be to encourage the open protocol, not build on top of closed ones…

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Which open standard is implemented? Not XMPP, not Mastodon or Matrix. And unless something changed, you can’t even make posts using that API, again to the point.

iMessage does have an API as well, it’s just not publicly available. Hence the current debacle

> Which open standard is implemented?

I never said anything about the protocol needing to be a standard.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

> iMessage does have an API as well, it’s just not publicly available.

That’s a hell of a “just” ;)

> The comments in here are weird. HN is normally an advocate for open protocols (like Mastodon, XMPP)

> It’s weird how open source has taken over the world and yet our messaging protocols have gotten more proprietary than ever.

…and not one mention of the term “standard”.

Something can be open and not a standard. Like the HN API.

Is the HN api proprietary?

Im not here to discuss HN and I’m not getting dragged into your strawman arguments. So ending our discussion here.

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