He didn't know what your guests are, and the fact is that, if your guests are all Windows, HyperV is less costly than vSphere 4.1 and way, waaaaay less than v5.
Yes, it's not as good, but in a big Windows shop it's kind of hard to ignore (potentially) hundreds of thousands of dollars of licensing costs. VMware was either stupid or arrogant not to have thought about it, and now a lot of it's customers are, if not switching, at least evaluating HyperV when before it wouldn't have gotten the time of day.
EMC/VMware got greedy with the licensing for v5 and anyone who used some the nicer features (vRAM oversubscription) could potentially find themselves paying a lot.
The drastic limit applied to vRAM in the lower tier editions of ESXi 5 smacks of greed. They might not get caught on this now, but it was bald-faced enough to make people think about going to v5 and to evaluate HyperV instead. I might add that HyperV looks a lot more attractive since MS gives away Windows guests licenses that you'd otherwise pay for with VMware. If you virtualize a lot of Windows servers, going to HyperV could save you huge dollars, whereas vSphere 5 will cost you more.
Consider NetWare: It was a better directory/file/print server than NT, but Microsoft made a compelling argument that NT4 and, eventually, Win2K were good enough that it was worth losing some features, especially if it meant cutting down on the number of platforms and boxes to manage. The pitch for HyperV is very, very similar.
HyperV might not be so hot now, but VMware can't get complacent. Now is the time to put the boots to HyperV, not cede market to it.
If you don't need HA and can live with a little guest downtime to migrate from a downed host to a cold spare, and have the wherewithal to figure out how to use the host efficiently, ESXi costs nothing and shared iSCSI or NFS storage that performs reasonably well is pretty cheap.
I've seen such a setup: a bunch of commodity Xeon 5520-equippped boxes attached to an EqualLogic SAN stuffed with SATA drives. It could have been cheaper if Equallogic would support customer-provided disks, because the premium on rotating rust, while not at EMC's level, was still pretty steep.
200 000+ stupid useless apps, maybe not. But more than 30 000 Debian packages (and counting), yes, OVERNIGHT!
How many of those applications are suited to use on a keyboardless, mouseless capacitive touchscreen?
I mean, really, how are you going to use XEmacs on a tablet? I mean, unless some hardware OEM adds escape, meta, alt, ctrl and shift keys---two of each, for preference---to the bezel.
The problem with this isn't Apple---you're right that they a) own the stack, and b) don't take shit from the carriers----it's Windows Phone. Microsoft has stated---and we'll more or less have to see---that the mess of updates/maybe/yes/no/depends that hurt BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile and (ostensibly) Android is not going to be a factor with Windows Phone. It's supposed to get OTA updates regardless of vendor or carrier.
Now, the average end-user doesn't really care about the OS version and what it can or can't do, they do care about the apps they can or can't run, and the developers who make those apps care about the OS version and the services it provides. And this means that Android is an expensively large target compared to WP or iOS. Users will notice if, eg, Angry Birds IV isn't available, and that kind of die-off in app availability could spread quickly and poison the platform.
Google, to it's detriment, has repeated the same mistakes that murdered Windows Mobile: they were more concerned about their baby (ad revenue, where Microsoft's goal with WM was extending the Windows monopoly) than they were with developers and end-users. They misunderstood that, in the modern mobile marketplace, users, and to a lesser degree, developers, are your customers, not carriers or hardware partners.
They need to get in front of this, and quickly, before Microsoft (again, not Apple, they're not the worry, here) exploits this weakness. If this means busting their hardware partners' balls (in that the ought not to shovel Android on any old piece of crap) and going over the carriers heads with updates, so be it. In the long term it's worth it for the platform and their precious ad revenue.
No, RIM's browser on the BBOS devices has never been on par with Mobile Safari except in certain very targeted benchmarks. In terms of user experience, the OS7 devices are just catching up to the 3GS now and there is no way you can claim that the OS6 devices, like the 9800 Torch I have, are in the same league as the iPhone 4.
They arent egregiously bad like OS5 or earlier, but that's damning with faint praise.
I can't honestly figure out why any tablet other than the iPad sells at all.
And this is why most geeks' take on this market is worth nothing.
You listed a bunch of hardware features. Most people don't care. Most people just want a device that works well and doesn't require them to fiddle or futz around. The iPad does this really, really well, and that's why it's sold---actually sold to end-users, not stuffed into a channel---millions and millions of units.
That geekdom can't or won't appreciate the "works well/no fiddling" part is why, eg, RIM is in deep crap. Their only saving grace is BBM which, ta-daa, requires hardly any fiddling and works really well.
PlayBooks have PINs, but you're right that a large part is the one-user-one-PIN model that BBM, as well as BIS (commercial email) and BES (enterprise email+collab), use.
That, and the code that supports it is probably pretty crufty---so much so that they cancelled the BBOS VM that would have been an easy way to run these apps on the PlayBook. It's the same problem that keeps delaying their QNX-based phones: getting a messaging infrastructure that's rickety, old, secure as hell and run on the same stuff for nearly a decade, over to a whole new platform without losing the "secure" and "managed" bits that basically are BlackBerry's reason to exist versus ActiveSync-equipped devices.
Ok, fair point, yes, they are thinking about design. They've got some road ahead of them, but you are right that they've moved it to the front boiler rather than applying it at the end of the line.
Yes, there are some rough edges on Android, but there are rough edges on iOS as well. Copy and paste doesn't work very well,
It doesn't work well on any handheld platform, but it's deplorable Android (and especially on Honeycomb), for example. Apple, at least, gives you a magnifying bubble that makes it possible to select text and place the cursor. On Android it's a total crapshoot.
BlackBerry does it best for power users, but only because of the optical trackpad and real cursor, but iOS actually does this quite well in that most people can figure it out. Android? No
multitasking is (by design) mostly nonexistent
Ah, I see. You've mistaken "rough edges" for "design decisions that don't jive with my preconceptions". Yes, iOS doesn't do multitasking well by design. That's because smartphone multitasking generally does not work well, that the devices aren't designed for it, that people don't really use it, and that Apple only added it once processing power made it reasonable, and that Apple's method for dealing with it, while crippled, works well for the way these things are used.
Full multitasking makes sense in a multiwindow environment. It's useless on a device designed around an interface that's single-app-full-screen.
Again, I'll bring this back to BlackBerry terms. RIM made a big deal about how the PlayBook lets you set multitasking behaviour; it was supposed to be a big advantage over iOS. No one, it turns out, gives a damn because they don't use the tablet in such a way that multitasking mode makes any sense. It's even more irrelevant a feature than Flash.
For example, I would fuck a water buffalo to get Swype on iOS.)
Most people wouldn't bother with Swype. I mean, yes, it works, but it would piss off 95% of consumers. It's worse than Graffiti in that it requires you to re-learn something so basic and fundamental that it's practically intuitive.
Cursor positioning is also better on Android.
That's just crazy talk. It's passable on phones (and has gotten worse since most phones dropped the G1-style hardware cursor control) and utterly wretched on Honeycomb tablets, where accurate placement is much, much harder than on the iPad.
This idea that Apple products are magically easy-to-use and perfectly polished is BS. They are good products, usually with fantastic industrial design, and usually very attractive to look at. But there's no magic to the user interface, and Android is really every bit as good.
They're not "magically" easier to use, but Apple does sweat the small stuff much, much better and doesn't pump stuff out that isn't really ready. That's the "special sauce", as it were. And no, Android is not every bit as good. Android does certain things well, and it works for people who can accept the rough edges and work past them, but it's not "as good" in that respect.
Calling it "magic" is really part of the problem: that's how Android fans have either failed to understand and/or tried to discount what Apple has done. As soon as you get over the attitude that it isn't magic, that it isn't about the RDF, ooh-shiny-marketing or hipster factors---in short, shedding the Android Victimhood Syndrome---you'll be able to understand that putting design and usability first, as Apple does, really matters in this market.
If it didn't, Apple wouldn't be raking it in on devices that are easily several months to a year behind the Next Big Android Handset.
One, the affordable (as in, cheap and uncontracted) Android phones utterly suck to use, so much so that you're probably better with a dumbphone. Two, for consumers, the "barrier" on both is equivalent, after both application quality as well as carrier and OEM reticence to update. Three, if you can handle a contracted phone, iOS devices aren't very expensive at all.
I mean, yes, Apple could make Nokia-style featurephones for the third-world, but that's not something they could do profitably, nor have any at expertise doing.
So, yeah, in that sense they're just another company. It would be nice, though, if the whole rest of the industry didn't keep trying to fight on Apple's terms. RIM is probably the only vendor even remotely able to do this (Nokia seems to have given up) and even they're getting their side of the script written for them.
Apple didn't shout "Me too!". They quietly demonstrated how well it worked.
There are people who are going to think Apple did it first, just like they do with GUIs, smartphones and tablets. The onus is on the whole rest of the industry to start delivering products and services that work as well as Apple's do so that Apple can't keep using that strategy. Currently, the whole rest of the industry seems content to look like chumps and, yes, "Me-too"-ists.
It's close enough for spec-sheet comparisons, which is pretty much what many Android manufacturers (and more than a few fans of the platform) fall back on.
Butbubut, it's got Super-Ultra-XVSAMOLED, 4+MEGA LTE-MAX and 2TB of flash. As soon as Fruitcake or Peach Flan comes out, it'll totally crush iOS!! Well, yeah, right now it might be a little buggy, and yeah, the interface hangs on occasion, and perhaps it's limited to 3G until the manufacturer releases an update that your carrier might not actually support, but the potential is there! Honest!
Disclosure: I have, and really like, my BlackBerry 9900; I've no skin in this game per se, but Apple really does present a cohesive, usable platform with most of the rough edges filed off. Maybe, maybe ICS will have closed the gap, but this kind of relentless focus on user experience isn't really Android's forte any more than Ubuntu comes even remotely close to Mac OS X.
Disclosure 2: I own both a PlayBook, iPad and LG Optimus Pad. The first and last, despite having box specs that more or less than meet Apple's unit, don't best the daily experience. For example, the PlayBook can play back 1080p; the iPad can maybe manage 720p, but the PlayBook's browser stutters and it's a bastard to type on and it lacks native e-mail. The LG has an even more broken browser (yes, you can get alternatives; they're not much better than stock) and a marginally-better keyboard, and the home screen stutters. How, in this day and age, can you ship a tablet with a subpar browser and mail client, when the 800lb Gorilla in the market nails all the basics perfectly. So they can both play back 1080p and both support Flash? So what?
Half-assed chasing of Siri is the same kind of thing. Apple doesn't own a big chunk of the market (and a bigger chunk of it's profits) because they have the most powerful, first out of the blocks and/or most open. They're doing it because their stuff doesn't exceed consumers' fiddle tolerance.
Have you noticed that the supposed tree huggers with a direct line to the treasury haven't managed to convince the, ahem, ultra-liberal, pinko, commie socialist Obama administration from actually weakening environmental controls?
Heck, that pinko/commie/anti-business group is even now thinking about weakening Sarbanes-Oxley now that they've slackened emissions regs. So, yeah, totally the greenies have all the power and big, established corporate interests have nothing.
Go have a look at OpenSecrets.org's list of contributions by sector. Green doesn't appear on the list. Energy most certainly. Now, they could be under "Ideology/Single Issue", but that's a pie shared by a lot of groups and topped by "Friends of John Boehner" and "Every Republican Counts".
So, yeah, if "follow the money" is the metric than a bunch of propellerhead scientists are way, way more credible than skeptics and deniers whose interests just happen to align with some of the most powerful, monied, entities on the planet.
The "polished as hell" was the revolutionary part. You'd think it was obvious, and yet intellectual giants from RIM to Nokia to Microsoft didn't see fit to offer a device that wasn't, well, a clunky piece of crap. But they didn't.
Hell, five years on RIM and Microsoft are just barely catching on, and Google is just---just---gettting around to filing the rough edges off Android.
Revolutions can some from unexpected sources. In Apple's case, it was developing a device targeted at consumers, rather than carriers, advertisers, partners or developers.
I don't think that would fix the problem, though. The FSF's point isn't that the source isn't available, it's that you can't release a GPL'ed product under, say, a distribution license that imposes further restrictions.
[blockquote]There is nothing that prevents any form of OSS from existing on the AppStore except perhaps some retarded interpretation of GPL.[/blockquote]
That "retarded interpretation of the GPL" got VLC for iOS strategically yanked from the App Store by a contributing developer (and not by VideoLAN, nor Applidium) who worked for Nokia.
Apple was okay with the app. Most (all save one?) of the developers were okay. The porter was okay. One guy wrecked it for everyone.
Butbutbut, all the little things add up! (Yes, they do. To a rounding error in the budgets of Defense or Medicare/Medicaid).
So, if this privatization stuff is such hot shit, let's privatize the military as well. I'm sure that'll work out just fine! I mean, if it's evil socialism to heal, feed and clothe people, it must be worse to publicly fund killing them, right?
Hell, on a related (hypocritical) note, Ron Paul, bastion of freedom, independence and libertarian wankery, seems to have no problem shilling for Federal public funds to deal with coastal damage in his own district. I'm sure, though, that he'd refuse funds to keep rising coastal waters from washing Galevston out to sea.
Typical libertarian nonsense: it's all waste and graft, unless it's my pet interest, then it's an essential part of the social contract. It's a movement that's just as delusional as Communism.
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He didn't know what your guests are, and the fact is that, if your guests are all Windows, HyperV is less costly than vSphere 4.1 and way, waaaaay less than v5.
Yes, it's not as good, but in a big Windows shop it's kind of hard to ignore (potentially) hundreds of thousands of dollars of licensing costs. VMware was either stupid or arrogant not to have thought about it, and now a lot of it's customers are, if not switching, at least evaluating HyperV when before it wouldn't have gotten the time of day.
+1. Million.
EMC/VMware got greedy with the licensing for v5 and anyone who used some the nicer features (vRAM oversubscription) could potentially find themselves paying a lot.
The drastic limit applied to vRAM in the lower tier editions of ESXi 5 smacks of greed. They might not get caught on this now, but it was bald-faced enough to make people think about going to v5 and to evaluate HyperV instead. I might add that HyperV looks a lot more attractive since MS gives away Windows guests licenses that you'd otherwise pay for with VMware. If you virtualize a lot of Windows servers, going to HyperV could save you huge dollars, whereas vSphere 5 will cost you more.
Consider NetWare: It was a better directory/file/print server than NT, but Microsoft made a compelling argument that NT4 and, eventually, Win2K were good enough that it was worth losing some features, especially if it meant cutting down on the number of platforms and boxes to manage. The pitch for HyperV is very, very similar.
HyperV might not be so hot now, but VMware can't get complacent. Now is the time to put the boots to HyperV, not cede market to it.
^ This.
If you don't need HA and can live with a little guest downtime to migrate from a downed host to a cold spare, and have the wherewithal to figure out how to use the host efficiently, ESXi costs nothing and shared iSCSI or NFS storage that performs reasonably well is pretty cheap.
I've seen such a setup: a bunch of commodity Xeon 5520-equippped boxes attached to an EqualLogic SAN stuffed with SATA drives. It could have been cheaper if Equallogic would support customer-provided disks, because the premium on rotating rust, while not at EMC's level, was still pretty steep.
One the funniest things about Reagan is that he's the only president to have headed a labour union.
How many of those applications are suited to use on a keyboardless, mouseless capacitive touchscreen?
I mean, really, how are you going to use XEmacs on a tablet? I mean, unless some hardware OEM adds escape, meta, alt, ctrl and shift keys---two of each, for preference---to the bezel.
The problem with this isn't Apple---you're right that they a) own the stack, and b) don't take shit from the carriers----it's Windows Phone. Microsoft has stated---and we'll more or less have to see---that the mess of updates/maybe/yes/no/depends that hurt BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile and (ostensibly) Android is not going to be a factor with Windows Phone. It's supposed to get OTA updates regardless of vendor or carrier.
Now, the average end-user doesn't really care about the OS version and what it can or can't do, they do care about the apps they can or can't run, and the developers who make those apps care about the OS version and the services it provides. And this means that Android is an expensively large target compared to WP or iOS. Users will notice if, eg, Angry Birds IV isn't available, and that kind of die-off in app availability could spread quickly and poison the platform.
Google, to it's detriment, has repeated the same mistakes that murdered Windows Mobile: they were more concerned about their baby (ad revenue, where Microsoft's goal with WM was extending the Windows monopoly) than they were with developers and end-users. They misunderstood that, in the modern mobile marketplace, users, and to a lesser degree, developers, are your customers, not carriers or hardware partners.
They need to get in front of this, and quickly, before Microsoft (again, not Apple, they're not the worry, here) exploits this weakness. If this means busting their hardware partners' balls (in that the ought not to shovel Android on any old piece of crap) and going over the carriers heads with updates, so be it. In the long term it's worth it for the platform and their precious ad revenue.
No, RIM's browser on the BBOS devices has never been on par with Mobile Safari except in certain very targeted benchmarks. In terms of user experience, the OS7 devices are just catching up to the 3GS now and there is no way you can claim that the OS6 devices, like the 9800 Torch I have, are in the same league as the iPhone 4.
They arent egregiously bad like OS5 or earlier, but that's damning with faint praise.
And this is why most geeks' take on this market is worth nothing.
You listed a bunch of hardware features. Most people don't care. Most people just want a device that works well and doesn't require them to fiddle or futz around. The iPad does this really, really well, and that's why it's sold---actually sold to end-users, not stuffed into a channel---millions and millions of units.
That geekdom can't or won't appreciate the "works well/no fiddling" part is why, eg, RIM is in deep crap. Their only saving grace is BBM which, ta-daa, requires hardly any fiddling and works really well.
PlayBooks have PINs, but you're right that a large part is the one-user-one-PIN model that BBM, as well as BIS (commercial email) and BES (enterprise email+collab), use.
That, and the code that supports it is probably pretty crufty---so much so that they cancelled the BBOS VM that would have been an easy way to run these apps on the PlayBook. It's the same problem that keeps delaying their QNX-based phones: getting a messaging infrastructure that's rickety, old, secure as hell and run on the same stuff for nearly a decade, over to a whole new platform without losing the "secure" and "managed" bits that basically are BlackBerry's reason to exist versus ActiveSync-equipped devices.
No, you've missed the point. Polish is important, moreso than features. If polish was a "just" then why is it so hard for anyone who isn't Apple?
Ok, fair point, yes, they are thinking about design. They've got some road ahead of them, but you are right that they've moved it to the front boiler rather than applying it at the end of the line.
Considering the whole topic is basically trolling for commentary like this, it's fair game.
Yes, you're talking about Vlingo and yes, it works pretty well. It's hampered by the platform, and it's not as good as Siri but it's reasonably close.
I have it for BlackBerry, and where it falls down is that it feels like a bolt-on where Siri seems more baked-in.
It doesn't work well on any handheld platform, but it's deplorable Android (and especially on Honeycomb), for example. Apple, at least, gives you a magnifying bubble that makes it possible to select text and place the cursor. On Android it's a total crapshoot.
BlackBerry does it best for power users, but only because of the optical trackpad and real cursor, but iOS actually does this quite well in that most people can figure it out. Android? No
Ah, I see. You've mistaken "rough edges" for "design decisions that don't jive with my preconceptions". Yes, iOS doesn't do multitasking well by design. That's because smartphone multitasking generally does not work well, that the devices aren't designed for it, that people don't really use it, and that Apple only added it once processing power made it reasonable, and that Apple's method for dealing with it, while crippled, works well for the way these things are used.
Full multitasking makes sense in a multiwindow environment. It's useless on a device designed around an interface that's single-app-full-screen.
Again, I'll bring this back to BlackBerry terms. RIM made a big deal about how the PlayBook lets you set multitasking behaviour; it was supposed to be a big advantage over iOS. No one, it turns out, gives a damn because they don't use the tablet in such a way that multitasking mode makes any sense. It's even more irrelevant a feature than Flash.
Most people wouldn't bother with Swype. I mean, yes, it works, but it would piss off 95% of consumers. It's worse than Graffiti in that it requires you to re-learn something so basic and fundamental that it's practically intuitive.
That's just crazy talk. It's passable on phones (and has gotten worse since most phones dropped the G1-style hardware cursor control) and utterly wretched on Honeycomb tablets, where accurate placement is much, much harder than on the iPad.
They're not "magically" easier to use, but Apple does sweat the small stuff much, much better and doesn't pump stuff out that isn't really ready. That's the "special sauce", as it were. And no, Android is not every bit as good. Android does certain things well, and it works for people who can accept the rough edges and work past them, but it's not "as good" in that respect.
Calling it "magic" is really part of the problem: that's how Android fans have either failed to understand and/or tried to discount what Apple has done. As soon as you get over the attitude that it isn't magic, that it isn't about the RDF, ooh-shiny-marketing or hipster factors---in short, shedding the Android Victimhood Syndrome---you'll be able to understand that putting design and usability first, as Apple does, really matters in this market.
If it didn't, Apple wouldn't be raking it in on devices that are easily several months to a year behind the Next Big Android Handset.
One, the affordable (as in, cheap and uncontracted) Android phones utterly suck to use, so much so that you're probably better with a dumbphone. Two, for consumers, the "barrier" on both is equivalent, after both application quality as well as carrier and OEM reticence to update. Three, if you can handle a contracted phone, iOS devices aren't very expensive at all.
I mean, yes, Apple could make Nokia-style featurephones for the third-world, but that's not something they could do profitably, nor have any at expertise doing.
So, yeah, in that sense they're just another company. It would be nice, though, if the whole rest of the industry didn't keep trying to fight on Apple's terms. RIM is probably the only vendor even remotely able to do this (Nokia seems to have given up) and even they're getting their side of the script written for them.
Apple didn't shout "Me too!". They quietly demonstrated how well it worked.
There are people who are going to think Apple did it first, just like they do with GUIs, smartphones and tablets. The onus is on the whole rest of the industry to start delivering products and services that work as well as Apple's do so that Apple can't keep using that strategy. Currently, the whole rest of the industry seems content to look like chumps and, yes, "Me-too"-ists.
It's close enough for spec-sheet comparisons, which is pretty much what many Android manufacturers (and more than a few fans of the platform) fall back on.
Butbubut, it's got Super-Ultra-XVSAMOLED, 4+MEGA LTE-MAX and 2TB of flash. As soon as Fruitcake or Peach Flan comes out, it'll totally crush iOS!! Well, yeah, right now it might be a little buggy, and yeah, the interface hangs on occasion, and perhaps it's limited to 3G until the manufacturer releases an update that your carrier might not actually support, but the potential is there! Honest!
Disclosure: I have, and really like, my BlackBerry 9900; I've no skin in this game per se, but Apple really does present a cohesive, usable platform with most of the rough edges filed off. Maybe, maybe ICS will have closed the gap, but this kind of relentless focus on user experience isn't really Android's forte any more than Ubuntu comes even remotely close to Mac OS X.
Disclosure 2: I own both a PlayBook, iPad and LG Optimus Pad. The first and last, despite having box specs that more or less than meet Apple's unit, don't best the daily experience. For example, the PlayBook can play back 1080p; the iPad can maybe manage 720p, but the PlayBook's browser stutters and it's a bastard to type on and it lacks native e-mail. The LG has an even more broken browser (yes, you can get alternatives; they're not much better than stock) and a marginally-better keyboard, and the home screen stutters. How, in this day and age, can you ship a tablet with a subpar browser and mail client, when the 800lb Gorilla in the market nails all the basics perfectly. So they can both play back 1080p and both support Flash? So what?
Half-assed chasing of Siri is the same kind of thing. Apple doesn't own a big chunk of the market (and a bigger chunk of it's profits) because they have the most powerful, first out of the blocks and/or most open. They're doing it because their stuff doesn't exceed consumers' fiddle tolerance.
Have you noticed that the supposed tree huggers with a direct line to the treasury haven't managed to convince the, ahem, ultra-liberal, pinko, commie socialist Obama administration from actually weakening environmental controls?
Heck, that pinko/commie/anti-business group is even now thinking about weakening Sarbanes-Oxley now that they've slackened emissions regs. So, yeah, totally the greenies have all the power and big, established corporate interests have nothing.
Go have a look at OpenSecrets.org's list of contributions by sector. Green doesn't appear on the list. Energy most certainly. Now, they could be under "Ideology/Single Issue", but that's a pie shared by a lot of groups and topped by "Friends of John Boehner" and "Every Republican Counts".
So, yeah, if "follow the money" is the metric than a bunch of propellerhead scientists are way, way more credible than skeptics and deniers whose interests just happen to align with some of the most powerful, monied, entities on the planet.
No, they didn't. They released a phone in a similar exterior package, but the Prada worked nothing like the iPhone.
The "polished as hell" was the revolutionary part. You'd think it was obvious, and yet intellectual giants from RIM to Nokia to Microsoft didn't see fit to offer a device that wasn't, well, a clunky piece of crap. But they didn't.
Hell, five years on RIM and Microsoft are just barely catching on, and Google is just---just---gettting around to filing the rough edges off Android.
Revolutions can some from unexpected sources. In Apple's case, it was developing a device targeted at consumers, rather than carriers, advertisers, partners or developers.
I am not sure this is the case. See http://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance
I don't think that would fix the problem, though. The FSF's point isn't that the source isn't available, it's that you can't release a GPL'ed product under, say, a distribution license that imposes further restrictions.
[blockquote]There is nothing that prevents any form of OSS from existing on the AppStore except perhaps some retarded interpretation of GPL.[/blockquote]
That "retarded interpretation of the GPL" got VLC for iOS strategically yanked from the App Store by a contributing developer (and not by VideoLAN, nor Applidium) who worked for Nokia.
Apple was okay with the app. Most (all save one?) of the developers were okay. The porter was okay. One guy wrecked it for everyone.
Nose. Face. Cut off. Spite.
Butbutbut, all the little things add up! (Yes, they do. To a rounding error in the budgets of Defense or Medicare/Medicaid).
So, if this privatization stuff is such hot shit, let's privatize the military as well. I'm sure that'll work out just fine! I mean, if it's evil socialism to heal, feed and clothe people, it must be worse to publicly fund killing them, right?
Hell, on a related (hypocritical) note, Ron Paul, bastion of freedom, independence and libertarian wankery, seems to have no problem shilling for Federal public funds to deal with coastal damage in his own district. I'm sure, though, that he'd refuse funds to keep rising coastal waters from washing Galevston out to sea.
Typical libertarian nonsense: it's all waste and graft, unless it's my pet interest, then it's an essential part of the social contract. It's a movement that's just as delusional as Communism.