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And Apple is no better in this regard. Both companies obviously want to prevent sales outside of their walled gardens -- soft deprecating independent software with warnings and 'on by default' blocks.

Of course they do, why not take 30% of everyone's work and keep control?

Maybe I misread Krita's situation but I'm not sure why they don't just pull out of the store and sell independently. Plenty of payment processors would be happy to take them on.

Pricing is always difficult, but for a product that well known there's almost certainly a tiered system they could set up that generates enough income to keep the lights on (or better).

I'm not sure why blockchain has become a perennial 'love to hate' favorite on a forum dedicated to 'disruptive' startups. The cynic in me would say the people complaining are the ones who sold their bitcoin for $100 back in the day and cannot stand the fact that they're out millions for not being forward-looking enough.

If that describes you, go invest in a new blockchain tech. There aren't actually that many -- most of the ICOs of the last year were for stuff built on the Ethereum network. Sort through that a bit and you'll find companies building entirely new blockchains, some of them incorporating very good, forward looking ideas.

Blockchain is still very young. You haven't missed out on anything. Do some homework. Invest.

But nothing useful has been built on a blockchain!

Go make something. You're smart. In the best traditions of the software industry it's almost entirely FOSS. Absolutely nothing stopping you from building something useful. And there's lots of funding available for those that do.

Saying blockchain is worthless is like saying public key cryptography is worthless. Before e-commerce it was sort of a novelty (the need for security was always there, sure). Now it's ubiquitous, as is e-commerce. The latter would not be possible without the former.

Even if the development is / remains purely driven by greed, the introduction of new financial markets and new investment vehicles means it's here to stay. There is zero chance this genie is going back in the bottle. Every day there are announcements about uptake by the finance industry and by governments.

But that's a shallow view of the possibilities. How about tamper-proof voting for governments? Nearly fee-less remittances? Un-censorable communication? Completely transparent non-profits? Trust-less provenance / chain of custody?

Let's be real. Humans are terrible to each other. Being to able to fight greed and corruption with a little math -- in a trust-less, incorruptible, self-sustaining way -- is potentially history changing.

> This is because OpenGL is at its essence a 2D API. The vertex shader accepts something as input and it produces 2D vertices in device coordinates (-1 to 1) as output.

And the same can be said for every other GPU API. That's what rasterization is. You take a bunch of input and put out a 2D texture. It's necessarily 2D because screens are 2D.

Luckily, first class support for matrices, 4D vectors, mipmaps, lighting (well, at least insofar as lighting is math), etc make it well suited for creating the illusion of 3D.

I get paid to work with OpenGL -- and, somewhat uniquely, 2D OpenGL. I'm confident in saying that while OpenGL might suffice for a 2D game engine and yes, might allow you to skip over a little bit of the math, it is terrible as a 2D UI engine.

GPU APIs are first and foremost for rendering 3D scenes. You can certainly use them for 2D but how well suited they are to that is dramatically dependent on what the use case is.

Are you suggesting Snapchat isn't making a meaningful, long-term contribution to society?

I agree, but there are some things that really only do make sense at scale. A friend is in SEA and used Uber Eats a lot. They took over then quickly pulled out, investing in Grab to hedge.

Anecdotally, Uber was much better than Grab is. Grab is more of local, pared down version of Uber and the service suffers for it. I've heard that Uber is a horrible company, but they really got food delivery right.

It's very hard to replicate that without massive scale. On one side of it it takes a lot of expertise and resources and on the other side it's not very profitable. I guess it didn't work for Uber in the end but their global, winner take all model worked from a consumer standpoint.

Anyway, not all of it is a throwaway fad. Some of things coming out of that monster make a meaningful contribution.

Sure, that's certainly a factor. But there's a large class of applications that can get by with the API that is available.

I'm not suggesting it's a way to build mobile applications without paying Apple. I'm suggesting it will be possible to deliver a product to (nearly) all platforms using 1) a single codebase and 2) bypassing walled gardens.

Personally I won't build products for an App Store anymore. They're too restrictive, expensive and time consuming to be worth it. But being able to, say, deliver a desktop product (either via the web or packed in something like Electron) and also deliver nearly the same experience to an iPad Pro would be huge.

WebAssembly isn't just a cross platform technology, it's also a way to target platforms that are currently walled gardens. Being able to run software on e.g., the iPad without paying Apple's 30% fee and being able to ship features / bug fixes without added delays is a big deal.

"Write-once, run everywhere without paying someone for the privilege"

I think the term's overused, but this could actually be a "game changer".