> 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.