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XML Co-Founder Joins Google, Blasts iPhone
XML co-founder Tim Bray has taken the job of 'Developer Advocate' at Google. Don't other companies call that position 'Evangelist?' Because he sure doesn't mince words against the iPhone in his first sermon: 'It's a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger.
XML vs. iPhone. I can't think of a better metaphor for "open but convoluted" vs. "closed but useable."
This is not a work-related "convenient opinion" of his. He's been critical of Apple's walled-garden approach to development for years, and an Android advocate since he got an Android phone in 2008 (see http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/12/18/Android-Diary for his chronicles using and programming it).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Just like the rest of us he can choose to buy, or not buy, an iPhone or any other Apple or non-Apple product.
... yet ;-)
We're all adults here and if he doesn't like Apple's rules about software of the iPod/iPhone/iPad then he can choose not to get one. It's as simple as that.
The government isn't requiring us all to get iProducts
Tim Bray bought his *first* smartphone in December 2008 and declared it the best he's ever owned:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/12/...
Maybe if he had tried 3 or 4 other phones and then settled on Android, his opinion would have weight.
This guy had never owned a "fancy phone" until 15 months ago and now he's an expert? Seriously Google, is this the best you can do?
Another way to look at it is that iPhone provides a solid single platform that developers can concentrate on features rather than UI and input differences.
Tim's critical of software patents, but his position is that there's just an implimentation problem - with good tweaking it could work. Kinda disappointing that he's not pushing for abolition. Surprising too given his experience in web dev and XML. Related info:
swpat.org is a publicly-editable wiki - help in expanding this info would be very welcome and useful.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
With the iPhone and iPad, Apple has become the Big Brother it railed against in the Superbowl ad of 1984.
As an owner of many Apple computers from the Apple ][ all the way to today, it's thoroughly depressing to have watched this happen. But I guess Apple's always been schizophrenic about opennness. One one hand you have Woz distributing schematics, the developer's signatures burnt into the Mac's first motherboard, embracing of open-sourced software & development tools, lack of copy protection on their OS, replacing drm music with watermarking, etc. But then you've got them suing Franklin & Pystar, suing HTC, their absurdly paternalistic App market, a closed-down iPad, etc. I guess there's always been a bit of hypocrisy and self-contradiction with Apple.
But when push comes to shove, I'm growing more convinced with the iPhone/iPad they really do see the future as being closed & proprietary. Google is the athlete running in swinging the hammer. And maybe it's Jobs' face on the big screen?
I guess Apple II isn't forever.
Technically RIM still holds the biggest smart phone market share with the iPhone in 2nd place.
Oh, so this is the guy who designed that bloated markup language. Yeah, I can't wait to not care any less what his opinion of a phone is.
He's right, though...
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Exactly - it's just like that Richard Dawkins guy - he's always talking about religion, but he's an atheist! How can he possibly know anything about religion if he doesn't believe in god!??!?!
I'm pretty sure you mean Nokia, not RIM.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
With this, my opinion of Google is now changing. I was a very large fan of Google and thought they were doing a fine balancing act between "making money" and "doing the 'right' thing." This, however, is turning things considerably ugly and is painting Google in a very unpleasant light. Mud-slinging is never pretty and often makes the slinger look worse than the target.
In case Google has forgotten, Apple has a lot of fans. Outright insulting Apple in this way forces people to decide, Apple or Google, and Google might not like the choice people make. After all, switching away from Apple means buying all new hardware and software. Switching away from Google just means typing in "www.bing.com".
I know which choice I'm going to be inclined to make in the future...
But at least it's the same version of the walled garden for all purchasers/users:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/android-version-confusion/
Sig this!
While verifying my sources just now, I found that Tim is, since February 2010, against software patents. Glad to hear it.
I've updated the wiki.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Of course he's going to blast the iPhone. Google needs to de-trone the iPhone as the market leader in advanced phones otherwise they run the risk of becoming irrelevant
Haha. The market leader in advanced phones remains the blackberry, which has had an open SDK and documentation freely available for years. You don't need RIM's blessing (or even RIM's knowledge) to sell your blackberry apps.
Google is trying to dethrone the market leader in coolness.
This post is completely wrong WRT the mouse.
And I was playing DRM-free mp3 music long before there was an iPod or iTunes.
Apple might be 'frist' in some things, but not much...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
I'm pretty sure you mean Nokia, not RIM.
No, he said smartphones. A smartphone is defined as being a device with few enough sales that the iphone looks like a serious competitor in comparison. Nokia do not make smartphones.
You've always been able to play MP3s on all digital music players. That's a key bullet point in the PPT presentation on how you even get funding to design and a digital music player. I'm not even going to argue about that.
Apple has had absolute control of their standards (Quicktime, proprietary audio formats/encryption, device lockin (itunes only works with ipod, and will update itunes to break compatibility with any other device)... Apple has always been very aggressive about vendor lockin, and only uses "open" standards when it serves their purpose to break into a market, and quickly lose interest once they have a substancial market share (see also: embrace, extend, extinguish).
I'm not trying to say Apple is completely evil, but they act more like Microsoft than most people realize, and only use open technologies enough to ease the paranoia of the technical community, knowing that their acceptance of products/technology is crucial to widespread consumer uptake (see also: Vista Failure).
moox. for a new generation.
iTunes ain't done till the Palm won't run!
But then again, apple fanboi's will always try to herd a stray iSheep back to the iFlock. There's even an app for that!
Or maybe they just get tired of anti-fanboi idiots making statements that seem to equate:
"Um, you're not forced to buy it. You're perfectly free to buy, enjoy, and develop for something else."
with
"Apple fanboi's will always try to herd a stray iSheep back to the iFlock."
For some reason, for a lot of geeks, it's never enough to just like something else that's not Apple. They have to LOUDLY TELL EVERYBODY ELSE THAT THEY SHOULD NOT LIKE APPLE TOO and this despite the fact that nobody's ever been forced to buy Apple.
Tweet, tweet.
Not to mention that CUPS and WebKit are both open standards that apple has used and contributed to for a long time. I don't see them being thrown aside.
just what the point of this hire is? Apple-bashing aside, is it just to put the shiny open-source face on Google? That didn't exactly save his previous employer, who also hired him for apparent PR value and where he accomplished nothing of sufficient significance to merit inclusion on his Wikipedia bio.
Perhaps if Apple is very, very lucky, Google will hire Jonathan Schwartz too.
Apple has had absolute control of their standards (Quicktime, proprietary audio formats/encryption, device lockin (itunes only works with ipod, and will update itunes to break compatibility with any other device)... Apple has always been very aggressive about vendor lockin, and only uses "open" standards when it serves their purpose to break into a market, and quickly lose interest once they have a substancial market share (see also: embrace, extend, extinguish).
Quicktime uses 'normal' formats - H264, mp4, etc. Apple don't have any proprietary audio or video formats. You're confusing format with DRM, and there's none of that in their music either.
Palm decision to use someone else's software to manage their device is a bad move in every sense. They become reliant on the experience provided by someone else, and open themselves up to being locked out. When Apple also provide APIs for accessing the iTunes database (hell, it's just an XML file, any dev worth their salt can write a parser, and there are plenty of open-source XML parsers out there) then Palm's decision looks more like posturing and using their own customers as a weapon.
Still, many of the /. crowd fell for Palm on this, hook line and sinker. It became an issue of 'freedom' or something, and not just a shabby development decision that was almost certainly going to bite them later.
As for EEE, can you give an example? I can understand how Microsoft could do that with IE, as they had market dominance. I can't see how Apple can do that in any market but mp3 players, and clearly they've not done so in that market.
Quicktime today is h.264 video with AAC audio (Sorensen is gone).
h.264 is a licensed technology owned by MPEG LA. While it did go free for a few more years for usage, it was set to lose that until about a month ago and is still a licensed technology that can be used to lock.
iTMS files are AAC audio and fairplay is gone. Fairplay was easy to remove by yourself and Apple documented how to do so.
Again, AAC audio is not an open technology, it's a licensed one. The license is quite a easy one to stream and distribute (free), but to use the actual codec itself requires a company to obtain a license. This is why FOSS FAAC and FAAD software projects are only distributed in source code form only to avoid the patent issues. As for Fairplay, it was Apples way of keeping any songs bought from iTunes to only play on iPods. No other MP3 player was able to read the files helping Apple keep a monopoly, and is still being fought under the Apple iPod iTunes Antitrust Litigation Not to mention Fairplay is still being used by Apple. Also couldn't find anything on the Apple.com site on how to remove Fairplay from anything.
iTunes works with anything as long as anything actually knows how to interact with iTunes (the fact Palm doesn't understand how is Palm's failure). Some vendors even get sync functionality (many Motorola devices, following the ROKR partnership), not just the iPod as you say.
iTunes works as long as Apple says it's ok, not if anything actually knows how to interact with iTunes. Palm does know how and kept programming to make it work. It was Apple that kept altering iTunes to purposely break that connection to wall out Palm since they didn't want to jump through Apple's hoops.
What was your point again ? Oh right, outright lies.
No, that was your point to make outright lies.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
So the Nokia N95 and E90 weren't smartphones ? Funny, because I could do stuff with those phones 5 years ago that I *still* can't do with an iPhone.
I think Tim Bray's rant on the iPhone is rather ill-considered & rather short-sighted.
Not legally. MP3 remains patented in the USA, and only licensees who pay the fees, or for whom the patent owners are willing to _accept_ fees, have been able to use it. This has actually been a serious problem for "free" operating systems, with whom the patent owners have either refused to cooperate or charged genuinely outrageous fees.
Fortunately, if you're not in the USA, there are plenty of downloadable players at locations like the "Penguin Liberation Front", which also has DVD decryption utilities, game emulators, and software with strange licenses that don't easily permit their use in Linux distributions.
While I agree that iPhone is mainly a shiny, overpriced toy, I that's going a bit far.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Just gonna burn some karma here since you've unfortunately been modded 0 flamebait:
As much as I enjoy tinkering w/ open source and recognise its massive contribution, why is it so hard for freetards to grasp the key issue:
For normal users (or even geeks who don't have the time/energy to care), walled garden that "just works" beats open solution that "sorta works" (even 'mostly') 10 times out of 10
You sir, are absolutely right, no matter how much we people who read slashdot, we denizens of the extreme right hand tail of the user bell curve, wish it weren't so.
iTunes works as long as Apple says it's ok, not if anything actually knows how to interact with iTunes. Palm does know how and kept programming to make it work. It was Apple that kept altering iTunes to purposely [slashdot.org] break [slashdot.org] that connection [slashdot.org] to wall out Palm since they didn't want to jump through Apple's hoops.
No, that's utter rubbish. There's a well-documented method for interacting with iTunes via its database. There are many third-party apps that do so, including the Amazon mp3 downloader which competes directly with the iTunes store. Palm were trying to piggy-back onto iTunes by partially emulating an iPod, which isn't something that Apple support (and why should they, any more than HP will support your Epson scanner with their scanning software), and made a huge fuss about it. Palm should have written their own code for interacting with their media player and interacted with iTunes (and any other software) through the right APIs.
I think the folks attacking Apple have as much of a track record of being consistently and intentionally wrong. Case in point.
For example, both my Mother and my Aunt, in their 60's, want an iPad. They are not fangrrrls. One has a Mac and would prefer the pad, the other doesn't use PC's a lot but would like a simple, portable device for email and internet, and easily sharing photos of my family (since she lives in Europe).
As for the walled garden, I'd say the motives are mixed. I (and many people I know) actually like walled gardens, in some circumstances, if it helps remove bullshit from my life. Not all circumstances, of course.
I do agree the blocking of iPad -> iPhone tethering is crap, but I can't tether on AT&T as it is.
-Stu
Apple never wanted Fairplay. It was a requirement to get the music industry to sign on. Jobs made that clear, and after just a few years, he got all DRM dropped from all tunes on the iTMS. This is not RDF, it's fact.
And that Palm silliness is ridiculous. They didn't have any brilliant technology, they had their device identify itself as an iPod, which is in violation of USB standards. Apple's updates just helped enforce the standards. It's easy enough for third parties such as Palm to make their own app that interfaces into the iTunes library via the easily parse-able XML file that drives the program; there was no reason for Palm to break the USB standard.
Your other points are reasonable enough, but again, Apple is not Microsoft. They may become that bad one day. It's always possible. But there is, as of yet, no comparison.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Reworking the line from Steve Ballmer. Everybody seems to be reminiscing about the days when this stuff was open, but it was open because that's what people wanted to buy! Steve Jobs could be a nasty guy like people pass him off (I don't know him, so I reserve judgement), but what he is good at is reading markets. He was good then, and he's good now. Steve Jobs doesn't care about openness more than closed-ness. The man wants a product that sells, he's a businessman to the core (and a damn good one at that). If it's open stuff, he'll make it, but right now he doesn't see it that way, and I'm inclined to agree with him. The typical consumer he's targeting wants an integrated product suite that "just works". Openness takes a backseat to dealing with the alternative (to your typical Mac user, IMO!!). You can't really hold it against the user, or Jobs, for creating a product and acting as such. I'm sure you can come up with other reasons to hate them though.. That Mac user loves his VW, lattes at Starbucks, thick black rimmed square glasses and listening to Moby. Steve Jobs is running a company that, apparently, goes nuts in court over patents and control of its OS.
Steve Jobs has always been against DRM. Apple didn't create FairPlay to lock out other portable music players, Apple created FairPlay to appease the record labels. Ironically, the only reason the record labels have acquiesced on this is that they became afraid of Apple's near-monopoly position, and saw selling non-DRM'd music (including via competitors like Amazon) as the only way they could weaken Apple's stranglehold on the market (they tried to sell DRM'd music through other companies, but nobody wanted it because it didn't work with the iPod).
What the GP poster was referring to was an officially-sanctioned method to burn DRM'd tracks to audio CD, then re-rip them and encode to a non-DRM'd format, thus incurring a reduction in quality due to the use of lossy compression. There are other ways of achieving that goal without going through the hassle of actually burning a CD, but that's not the same as removing the DRM. There was one app that really did remove the DRM from iTunes Store purchased music, but Apple broke it in the next release of iTunes and it was never heard from again.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Microsoft was sued by 20 State Attorneys General for violating antitrust laws.
I don't think there's much of a comparison between Apple and Microsoft.
No! You don't get it! That's how deep the conspiracy goes! Either Apple has brainwashed state governments so they don't see that Apple's also violating the same antitrust laws, or fanbois have infiltrated those governments! There's no other possible explanation!
Wake up sheeple and see the truth before it's too late and we have iGovernment!
Tweet, tweet.
At the store, Roark had never been told that his HTC Eris has Android 1.5, nicknamed “Cupcake.” Until told by a reporter, he had no idea what features he’s missing as a result. For instance, free turn-by-turn navigation is available in the latest version, Android 2.1 (”Eclair”), but is only available to Cupcake users for $10 a month from Verizon.
Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/android-version-confusion/#ixzz0iJv1DstU
The carriers have been fucking us for years. Half the talk on forums is how to uninstall the shitty bloatware that carriers install on the android phones. Hey, at least with an android phone you *can* do it, unlike every other motorola, nokia slow-fest.
The iphone is the best phone i've ever had. It has an alarm that works, and I can set for only weekdays. How hard is that???? It has a battery life of more than a few hours (I'm looking at you, my Samsung windows mobile phone). It has a headset with a NORMAL HEADSET JACK. It charges by plugging into my USB. How is it that such simple pleasures make this the best phone ever? Because all the others are corrupted bloatware pocket fillers, courtesy of the "carriers".
The iPhone works because Apple took on the carriers. The various Droid market is failing because carriers are worse than M$. Between you and google is a carrier. Good luck with that!
iTunes works as long as Apple says it's ok, not if anything actually knows how to interact with iTunes. Palm does know how and kept programming to make it work. It was Apple that kept altering iTunes to purposely break that connection to wall out Palm since they didn't want to jump through Apple's hoops.
Eh... Palm was connecting to iTunes by faking its usb vendor id, imposting as a genuine Apple device. This technique is heavily frowned upon by the USB Implementers Forum, no matter how noble the cause. It's like the usb equivalent of identity theft. So i'm afraid Palm is no saint either.
Slashdot as a group is ALWAYS against what you are for.
Slashdot is filled with hippies/gun nuts.
Slashdot is filled with rabid republicans/demented democrats.
Slashdot is filled with MS apologists/BSD freaks/Apple fanboys. They are all seen as silly by the enlightened linux users who are well above this kind of shameful name calling what are after all their fellow human beings even if they are obviously less evolved.
Slashdot is filled with Trek nerds/People that hate Trek for being nerdy/Hate trek for not being nerdy enough.
Slashdot is filled with virgins/people who lie about having had sex.
Oh and the best way to make a claim that slashdot is against you? Claim you are going to be modded down for saying it. Then when you are modded up, don't change your mind.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think it is like with all new technologies that settel in the consumer market.
First, there are the early adopters who can - an take pride in the fact that they can - manipulate and fix those technologies.
As that technology becomes more common - more and more users are
a) not willing to invest a huge amount of time to be able to use this technology correctly and
b) dont want to rely an an early adopter to do so.
As the technology further matures, the neccessety - and with it the possibility - to maipulate and fix this technology by yourself disappears.
The early adopters loose the possibility of beeing more than just "dumb users" and feel caged because that technology has been kind of locked down.
But for the users that have by now become the majority it is most convenient to use it without having to get into it too deeply.
The early adopters find a niche (product ) where they still can test their technical skills on and the overall consumer is just happy this easy-to-use piece of technology exists.
That said:
- assuring no app can do bad things through strict quality controll
- strict guidelines for userinterface design
- limit external interfaces and provide a standard way of data exchange
sounds to me like being a good thing for serving the average user.
And that Palm silliness is ridiculous. They didn't have any brilliant technology, they had their device identify itself as an iPod, which is in violation of USB standards. Apple's updates just helped enforce the standards. It's easy enough for third parties such as Palm to make their own app that interfaces into the iTunes library via the easily parse-able XML file that drives the program; there was no reason for Palm to break the USB standard.
I'm considered an Apple fan among my friends. But that whole paragraph is so stupid -- particularly the sentence I marked up -- that it bears repeating. RDF/Stockholm Syndrome in action. If MS pulled shit like that (and I'm not sure they have) I doubt anybody would be in a rush to defend them.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
All you need to ask yourself is why did he even say the word "iPhone" at all? He just got hired by Google. WTF has iPhone got to do with anything? Seriously, ask yourself that. None of the answers are good for Google.
The misinformation was also very sad, since he is someone who has contributed mightily in the past. He should at least have the standards of a Gizmodo review. It was sad to see him say the Internet is locked down on iPhone when it is clearly not in any way locked down, nor is it proprietary like Microsoft or Adobe. It was also sad to see him say that iPhone has limited the conversation on the Internet when it's clearly drawn an even larger audience to the conversation, providing many people with the first Internet device that they could master, causing many people to discover text messaging or Twitter and so on for the first time. Not only that but these are the very first native app purchases and installs for many users. Also sad that he thinks the successful, popular, and malware-free iPhone App Store should change to be more like the fragmented, unpopular, malware-serving Android Market. And he clearly doesn't understand that App Store is not the only place to get iPhone apps, it is only 1 of 2 app platforms on iPhone ... App Store is entirely optional. The other platform is totally open, totally unmanaged, totally unmediated, uses open API's, and apps are installed from any arbitrary HTTP server. The alternative is there already if App Store is not for you. Why does it bother the Nerd Police so much that users on iPhone have their own choice of either managed or unmanaged apps? With all that has happened with Windows malware and botnets, why is it so important that *phone users* should be exposed to a native malware risk?
But this is the guy who said he would never type on a virtual keyboard and how awful iPhone was for having that, how stupid the users were for not being able to type on the device (he imagined) until he got a G1 with a much worse virtual keyboard than iPhone and said it was OK, he could live with it. So it's actually not surprising to see him talking out of his ass rather than actually trying the gear, learning about it, finding out about it.
Imagine if Google had hired a hardware chief instead, and announced they were making a "true Google phone" like so many have asked for. I think that would have been a much more interesting move, and they could have done it without saying "iPhone." Well, maybe not. Too bad.
One reason Android beat out Openmoko was because Google was willing to make a platform that carriers could turn into a walled garden if they wanted to, while Openmoko was designed to NOT be locked down.
Sure, technically Google isn't doing evil here. They're just enabling AT&T to do it.
Whether you are for Apple or for Google, you will eventually get tired of the conversation. So here is how to add some spice.
"Well, I mean OS X and Android are both Unix derivitaves, so as long as we're supporting open source I'm all for it."
Hilarity ensues on many levels.
Oh right, because the USB guys are objective.
The fact is that the iTunes Client is the only interface to the iTunes Store, and iPod's and other Apple devices enjoy the special status of being the only ones with integrated syncing via that iTunes Client.
If Microsoft got a big hit in the MP3 player market first, with its own big hit store, with its own DRM and non-interoperability with competitors, people would be still be bitching about it a decade after Microsoft got fined for anti-trust.
If Microsoft then produced a big-hit client for their competitors operating systems that ninja-installed several other unrelated products when it updated, one of which was so unstable that it caused kernel crashing and even when functioning properly eats up CPU and spams the local network with traffic, you would never ever hear the end of that.
But its Apple, so people welcome these things with a big fat "Bonjour!"
"His name was James Damore."
They could do what The Missing Sync does - funnily enough, the software that came about because Palm abandoned the Mac platform in the first place, so a 3rd party piece of software was needed to sync your Palm device.
http://www.markspace.com/products/pre/mac-features.html
They didn't need to write an iTunes replacement - they just needed to go the proper route to write a piece of software that would allow the Pre to sync, but spoofing Apple's vendor ID was cheaper that either writing their own software to interface with iTunes (and iCal/Entourage/Address Book etc), or bundling copies of The Missing Sync with Palm Pres that they sold.
There are documented ways to sync on the Mac. None of the are of the form "1. spoof Apple's vendor ID, 2.?????? 3. Profit". Interoperation exists, it's just not seamless unless you write an interface - iTunes doesn't do it all for you like it does with the iPod/iPhone.
Have you used The Missing Sync? It knows where your iTunes Library is, and it knows your playlists as you have set them up in iTunes itself.
You just select the playlists you want to sync from within the sync app itself, in much the same way you do for the iPod. Even the icons are the same.
The only difference is that the window that you put the checkboxes in (with your playlists, read right off the iTunes DB by the app automatically) is not inside the iTunes window itself. The sync experience itself is *practically* identical.
The Missing Sync enables much more than just "capable of syncing" - the experience is smooth and relatively seamless. All you have over the iPod is the fact that you need this app running instead of just using iTunes to do it all for you. The iTunes sync features are superfluous when you are using it since it replicates everything iTunes does.
I'm not being disingenuous here - I am in no way attempting to hide the fact that the app doesn't create a totally integrated experience - it clearly does not, but for the user there is very little difference.
Again, you can drop the hostility. I'm not interested in ad hominem attacks. I have not been hostile to you. Please act your age.