Comment by jeena
4 months ago
Back in the 2007 or when it came out in Sweden I bought the iPhone and started developing for it. This was cool, new and exciting and it was fine as long as my company was paying the $100 fee every year. But then I switched jobs and worked at a company which produced mostly open source code. Suddenly I would have to pay $100 every year just to be able to put my own software on the phone ...
This is why I switched to Android, just for Google now to pull the rug from under my feet again ...
This situation would have been avoided if we, as community of engineers, had insisted on full and uncompromised open source (Stallmanist or GPL way) right from the start instead of going the ESR way of half-hearted open source where it's technically open but corporates get to have a free lunch and make abuses.
Like most coders, I also prefer the permissive MIT/Apache/BSD licensing for most software projects but incidents like these make me question the direction we are heading towards. They raise fundamental questions about freedom itself - looking at the broader picture, is having a restrictive kind of freedom (GPL) often more beneficial than having full permissive freedom (MIT/Apache)?
But Linux is GPL. That didn't stop Google from using it as a basis for something that is not GPL and in fact not even open source (Google Play Services).
What leverage does a community of engineers have to insist on anything? Android could be entirely closed source. So could Chrome.
It would be naive to assume that the power dynamics in our society can be fundamentally altered by a 10 line software license.
The Linux kernel is a separate system layer here, it's the AOSP parts like the Dalvik Runtime (equivalent of JRE) and components built on top of it (such as Play Store) which are being subject to permissive licensing abuse. If AOSP itself was GPL licensed, it'd have been difficult for Google to create something closed like Play Store as it'd have been considered derivative work.
You're right that broadly speaking, there is very little that could be done to stop this but having a culture of "everything GPL" in an organization definitely helps. For example, Sun was farsighted enough, though they couldn't stop Oracle from acquiring MySql, Oracle was still forced to keep MySql under GPL and they were able to salvage MariaDB too.
Similar was the case with Java. Oracle tried everything in its power to control its use and direction including legal means, it's only thanks to GPL that alternative implementations like OpenJDK and Amazon Corretto still exist. We can't even imagine the state of these software today if Sun hadn't licensed them under GPL originally but used some other permissive license instead!
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Not that it would help in this particular scenario, but Linux did not embrace the GPL development from about 20 years ago.
But they are!!
I have a "weakly held strong opinion" on this subject. I think open source has been a disaster for the state of software for normal people. On the one hand exploited developers making peanuts or nothing for their hard work. On the other hand exploited users losing control of their devices and social networks.
The era when people paid an affordable fee for software they could use however they wanted was much better. But it got squeezed out by free software on the one side and serf-ware on the other.
The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is rotten.
Edit: then again maybe it's unfair of me to blame the decline in paid for software on open source.
> The era when people paid an affordable fee for software they could use however they wanted was much better. But it got squeezed out by free software on the one side and serf-ware on the other.
Charging for free and open-source software is not only possible, but encouraged Stallman himself.
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I have been involved in open source projects with various structures and sustainability models. Open-core Enterprise software startups, unfunded or underfunded middleware/libraries and underfunded end-consumer software/apps. A real problem that I have with lots of open source is a mismatch between technical talent to produce software, an open ethos/philosophy (finding true believers in a much more open future), AND the most important often missing piece, a product mindset and willingness to do work that isn't just software dev. So many FOSS projects I have seen, with capable engineers spending years of their lives working on them, are lacking product management, a willingness to let users actually push the project in a direction that is more approachable to a mass audience, and the willingness to do the hard boring work of making software run everywhere. Lots of stuff falls into this general gripe, and a bunch of it isn't news to anyone. Lots of open source has shitty design/UX, every damn one of us that lives with desktop Linux knows exactly why it's not the year of the Linux desktop. The sleep function on the laptop I am writing this comment on doesn't work right (when booted into Linux), and every few months you have to find terminal wizardry to fix normal shit that should have a GUI config interface to un-fuck it, but "real software people don't touch their mouse unless they absolutely must". This comment got a bit off the rails, anyway, long live FOSS!
People developing software for free will never compete with thousands of engineers employed at corporations working every day. Who has time for that except those that are rich and retired?
We need a non corporate model of software development, something like worker owned coops.
Disclaimer: I really like Open source.
I think without open source something similar might have happened to a lot of software, but instead of becoming Open, they'd become gratis (free/zero cost), or almost so. The heart of the matter is that software has near-0 cost of distribution, so making 1 trillion is basically the same cost (to the developer) as making 1 unit. So since developers have free economies of scale, they are highly incentivized to lower the price to capture most of the market, I think. Software also requires relatively little maintenance, it doesn't rot[1] -- good software basically lasts forever with some minor up-keeping. Add in competition, and the tendency is for cost to go to near 0, at least for relatively popular software. But then there are two problems:
(1) If the company goes under, the software is lost, or rather it could be reverse engineered with huge difficulty and some information loss about the actual code.
(2) The incentives are still not well aligned with users. The makers are incentivized to rely on advertisements, get (and sell) user data, make their software addictive, and more.
On (1), FOSS software guarantees the source will be available and can be ported to new systems, basically becoming a common good. On (2), the incentives are very well aligned for FOSS, development can become a community effort, and in the rare case a developer would turn to collecting and selling user data or dark patterns, the software can be forked for example. In particular Open source funded by grants, donations and community/voluntary work is very aligned with public interest.
I get the downside that it could be unfair that developers aren't being paid as much, but I believe it wouldn't be much of a difference in income (for those kinds of software), and we can and should as a community donate to open source efforts (and since it's clearly in the public benefit I think governments, companies and all sorts of organizations would be wise to do so).
Finally, you're basically still free to create and sell closed source software, you just have to compete with community and volunteer efforts. I think it's well within your right (and it might make sense in some cases, say niche software). But I think it's worth considering carefully wether it's best for the product, for you and for the community to have it closed or open.
(also, indeed you can sell FOSS, but to be honest I don't know of many success stories in this regard (anyone share some examples?); I know arduino which is open software/hardware was very successful selling their genuine boards/having a pay request on download that you can dismiss. On Linux package managers make this difficult, although Flathub recently added donation buttons!).
[1] There are some issues popularly called "software rot", but it's basically some relatively minor (compared to the rot of many physical goods) compatibility issues when interacting systems change.
Sounds a bit like victim blaming, how is it the fault of open source software that corporations are exploiting them?
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> ... uncompromised open source (Stallmanist ...
Of course, Stallman strongly eschews the ambiguity and misdirection inherent in the phrase open source, and in this particular instance the considered use of 'free' or 'freedom' is precisely what we're now all upset about the impending loss of.
GPL doesn't help you one bit in this particular situation, because "regular users" would still be using the locked-down stock Android that came with their device. So they still can't install your app.
Anyone who is already running a rooted Android or otherwise customized OS isn't affected by this, only developers who want to distribute their app to users.
AFAIK GPLv3 requires to allow user to run modified software (so essentially device must be unlockable). Android is not GPLv3, unfortunately.
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I can't root or otherwise customize my OS on my device because Linux is not GPLv3.
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Would that have really stoped google having its own cloud/app layer on top of the base system? OEM could still lock the bootloaders.
Unless, maybe the EU, enforce a right to repair and tinker we'll be at the mercy of these companies with their walled gardens.
Google is the modern Microsoft spiritual successor to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Look at all the people who use gmail, youtube, etc all from a web app that Google wholly controls.
> This situation would have been avoided if we, as community of engineers, had insisted on full and uncompromised open source (Stallmanist or GPL way) right from the start instead of going the ESR way of half-hearted open source where it's technically open but corporates get to have a free lunch and make abuses.
And we would have been in a better position to lobby for this if unions were widespread in the tech industry, which they are not.
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> We accept everyone who accepts everyone.
If we were to accept and enforce this rule, billions of followers of some major religions would not be eligible to be part of a free and open society.
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Yeah, this is pretty much the rationale behind the Paradox of Tolerance, which you alluded to. Just as a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance without eventually just becoming intolerant, this clearly demonstrates that the same is true for Free Software. If we tolerate the use of Free Software for the use of the non-free software, eventually one loses the freedom in Free Software.
It's of course not a perfect analogy since the original Free Software still exists, but since in practice the dependency was from free towards non-free, like in this instance, it still works. Google and its anti-freedom practices are still in effective control of the Android ecosystem even though it's still technically free by way of AOSP.
And just as how some people argue that intolerance of the intolerant by a tolerant society is bad, so do some people argue that things like the GPL is bad because it prevents downstream modifications etc. going from free to non-free. Maybe this will help re-evaluate the culture around this stuff.
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Can you explain how you mean this in the context of software?
What you describe sounds like the paradox of intolerance but I fail to see how that can be applied to free software.
Freedom in general: You can't have absolute freedom because that includes the freedom to take the freedom from others.
In software: You can't have absolutely free software because ... ? I fail to see how free software might infringe on the freedom of others.
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I hate that you’re being downvoted. You are absolutely right here.
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Just because we “allow nazis” doesn’t mean society will turn into an authoritarian dictatorship.
People are not stupid.
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> half-hearted open source where it's technically open but corporates get to have a free lunch and make abuses.
I'd argue what you describe as "half-hearted" is actually more true to open source and libre software than restrictive licensing.
Im a millennial dev which happens to have a Gen Z brother who also chose this profession.
Seeing him walk my steps 15 years later has been eye opening for the brutal cultural change.
They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegal, that every tool is associated with a corporation, and that learning itself is going through certain hoops (by the uni, the certificator or whatever) so that you get permission to earn money a certain way.
As more doors get closed, I fear this process will solidify.
> They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegal, that every tool is associated with a corporation, and that learning itself is going through certain hoops (by the uni, the certificator or whatever) so that you get permission to earn money a certain way.
To be fair, there are also legit reason for why it evolved this way. It's mainly for quality and reliability. There is so much crappy sloppy work from unqualified workers, and it used to be even worse.. The easy available free knowledge really helped to rise the standard even for people without proper education in an area.
I don't fully agree with that, IMO it's a multifaceted problem.
There's the obvious fact that tech has become the new path to high salaries, and culture changes when people are pursuing the money rather than the trade.
There's the centralisation and capture of resources - app stores in mobile, message boards moving to reddit then being astroturfed, hardware closing to repairs for water resistance/ form factor reasons...
There's also the death of piracy limiting access to resources. Apps, courses and books were files pirated massively, online services kinda stopped that.
I don't think free/open source resources failed to catch up in quality, but I do think they failed to soften friction and remove the barrier of access. Consider mastodon vs twitter, creating a website vs a facebook page, sideloading an app vs app stores, reading a manual vs an influencer course.
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> ... mainly for quality and reliability.
And yet, it continues to decline year over year.
> They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegal
Piracy is technically illegal, but that didn’t stop us.
They're right. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and Enshittification have been the core experiences of digital life with corporations in charge of platforms.
My hope is that LLMs will help open source developers provide reasonable alternatives to the gatekeeping and spyware that corporations are now making their bread and butter. Example: Recent tried to use Unity LTS for a small project - the software is a joke now, basic functionality is broken out of the box. A couple of hours with an LLM and I had all the features I needed using a more lightweight library, monogame. Not an operating system, but I'm hoping the pattern will continue as LLMs get more proficient at code - the moat of "this is hard and laborious to do" will be drained.
An issue is that it’s not only the corpos, there’s also an increase of individuality that has become the norm.
For example, try to learn from an online resource and you’ll see that the most popular sources (YouTubers, twitchers, etc) are all preparing a rug pull to a non free resource, slipping undisclosed ads as content or straight up selling snake oil.
I grew up assuming that a random guy on the internet had always genuine intentions, even those who were assholes. Now the default is either a paid account, a bot, or someone trying to grind for personal gain. Everything’s adversarial.
Ironically, somewhere around 2014, Google was doing the exact same style "keep Android open" campaign, recruiting developers around the world - including me, to help lobby for keeping Android "open" and tell the horror stories of issues that random OEMs caused by forking Android, breaking compatibility and security.
Made sense to me at the time and they were really into "Android should be open source" vibe, so I supported it.
10 years later, I'm also rugpulled. Their vision has dramatically shifted into trying to build a walled garden on top of Android, but now they are haunted by their open source roots, and the walled garden is just a really tall pile of bricks laid around it.
So many times we've been promised things, only for them to be delivered in a half-baked state with half of the parts open source while other parts were closed only to Google and Google approved apps.
So many times the issue trackers for different parts of the platform ecosystem have changed, that some issues are impossible to debug without using web archive. And just as many times, they have been closed, ignored for years or unnoticed, being ping-ponged among team members until they forget about it.
Yet, even with all of the closed and privatized parts of the ecosystem, they are still not able to deliver on an ecosystem promise.
They control my email, my photos, my cloud, my browser, my phone - yet cannot keep a single thing properly in sync. Still, I download something and I do not know where it went. Still, I cannot Airdrop things without a 3rd party service. Still, I take a photo only for it to appear on the cloud 5 minutes later. Still, I cannot have a "sandbox" account for testing that just works, but have to juggle multiple accounts, causing their auth system to break 80% of the time when testing.
As a developer, I do not plan to support Android anymore. I recently got an iPhone, and am now fully switching to it. Even tho I am long on $GOOG stock, because the money printer go brrr, I will be spending that money in the Apple's ecosystem from now on.
Apple pisses off many HN users who then swear to switch to Android, Google pisses off many HN users who then swear to switch to an iPhone – so for both companies, in effect, nothing changes.
Aside from that, the masses don't care or know about any of this. A couple of HN users don't make a dent in the revenue of any large company. What we can do is work on alternative ecosystems or at least support the small companies and organizations who do with our wallets.
People who switch are a vocal minority too.
It doesn't make sense to choose between a snake that bit you and another that bit you earlier.
If you don't want to be bitten, get out of the snake pit.
> 10 years later, I'm also rugpulled. Their vision has dramatically shifted into trying to build a walled garden on top of Android
Abrupt abandoning of their Nexus line for overpriced Pixel hardware was the watershed moment. The exact moment when their executives decided to ride free on open source labor.
> Still, I cannot Airdrop things without a 3rd party service
Well, it hardly works between Apple devices themselves to begin with (sending a bunch of pictures over to a 4 years old iphone works like 1 times out of 10 trial..). At least I can use regular old Bluetooth to send stuff to any kind of device from Android without the cruel gatekeeping of only Apple devices.
So yeah, both platforms have their own ways they suck in.
Out of curiosity, have you seen Genode before?
https://genode.org
One of the things it works on is the PinePhone, so there's _some_ hope of at least one viable alternative happening:
https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3...
Yeah, I don't understand why people put up with Apple for this. I would love to write small personal apps for my iPhone. But, I don't want to use a mac, I don't want to pay a fee every year and I don't want to use the apple store (yes there are convoluted work-rounds for the last one).
It’s precisely because it’s a filter, they _want_ to filter for people who take it seriously and/or are seeking app sales. This is a company that chooses to pay people to review every app submitted to the app store, they don’t want millions of apps by tinkerers being submitted, and it reduces total crapware in the store.
I’m not necessarily advocating for this approach, just explaining why they do it.
Doesn’t the play store also charge a fee? It’s smaller from memory but it isn’t free
Then why don't they make it stupid easy to just make a build for the iPhone and transfer it directly?
Also, I am highly suspicious that they check every app submitted to the app store with a human.
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Have you tried Expo Go?
I can see why they add the fee, but they would both garner so much goodwill by giving free accounts if the app you publish is open source. I don't think it would be that hard to automate by requiring a GitHub link.
Those days are over. Being evil means there is no goodwill to begin with unless you can exploit it financially wise. Google stopped being not evil, they specifically deleted it from the code of conduct.
Ofc, being evil is subjective. But also this is the first excuse of evil players!
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> goodwill
Doesn't seem like something they consider a positive though.
See I was similar but the big difference back then was a random little 99c app on iOS would make you several thousand dollars a month, so the $100/year fee was nothing for a long time. It was only after around 2012 that things changed.
On Google Play I never, ever had any app be anything close to as successful as on iOS. I think I probably made less than 1/100th the amount I did on iOS back in the day.
You don't need a paid dev account to build and run on your own iPhone. I didn't have one most of the time
I totally agree with your sentiment, but can't you still do that with Android?
IIUC, you can still load apps directly via adb. Is that not correct?
Yes, you can still do that directly (I did that just the other day).
I can't entirely understand Google's announcement, but it almost sounded to me like they will forbid sideloading if you're not an "official" dev (gone through their hoops). I also saw something in their statement about wanting to support hobbyists. It sounded like an afterthought.
I don’t know what it was like back then but in today’s world you do not need to pay Apple any fees if all you’re doing is writing software in Xcode and deploy it to your own device. You do need a developer account, the free version of one, but you only need to pay the fee if you’re going to publish on the App Store.
Free provisioning: If you do not pay the developer fee an app installed via Xcode will work for 7 days. Afterwards the app on your phone will *stop working*, and you must open Xcode on your Mac again, and push a new build to your phone if you want to keep using it.
Paid provisioning: If you have paid the developer fee, a build will expire based on the amount of time left before that payment renews, so if you build and install an app a month before your developer fee renews, that build of the app (that you installed via Xcode) will stop working in 1 month.
We're stuck between two mafia families :-(
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I've been doing it that way for years on the free account, never seemed like a bother to me. I usually have a tweak I want to make to the code anyway. But I suppose some might find it inconvenient.
In any case, to say you can't put your own apps on your phone without paying a fee is incorrect, which is the comment I was responding to.
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Don't you also need to buy a Macbook? That is quite expensive. I guess in Apple's view also developping on a non-Apple device is a security risk.
I’ve never considered or tried anything other than using a Mac, so I don’t know. But I was responding to a comment about a different matter, the fees for a developer account.
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100$ a year for a dev in Sweden - that's like money you wouldn't notice if it got lost in your pockets - and I am sure it cuts down on spammers and covers administrative cost.
I have no problem with a store having a small admission fee - that's perfectly reasonable and they do have operational costs. It would be nice if they had some way to waive the fee for popular OSS to garner some god will with the devs.
Taking a 30% cut of revenue on the other hand ... both platforms are guilty of this
> 100$ a year for a dev in Sweden - that's like money you wouldn't notice if it got lost in your pockets
For someone who is making money from it, sure, but that's exactly who this isn't about. The way they get screwed is by the 30%.
A fixed fee -- in any amount -- is screwing the people who aren't in it for the money. Because to begin with, it's not just the fee, it's the bureaucracy that comes with the fee.
You're a kid and you want to make your first app, but you don't have a credit card.
You live in a poor country and maybe the amount you can lose without noticing when you're rich isn't the same there. Or even if you can get the money, you may not have a first world bank account and the conglomerate isn't set up to take the local currency.
You're a desktop developer and you're willing to make a simple mobile app and give it away for free as long as it's not a bother. The money is nothing but the paperwork is a bother so you don't do it, and now the million people who would have used that app don't have it and have to suffer the spam-laden trash alternative from someone who is only in it for the money.
And suppose the amount is as trivial as you propose. Then why does a multi-trillion dollar conglomerate need that pittance from a million ordinary people?
>And suppose the amount is as trivial as you propose. Then why does a multi-trillion dollar conglomerate need that pittance from a million ordinary people?
Reminds me how in the 1970s and 1980s there used to be these ads in the back of magazines in which a person who supposedly became a millionaire sold pamphlets for $5 telling his secrets to success. The obvious question was why such a successful person would need $5 from poor people (unless that was one of his secrets to success, I suppose).
You bring up several important issues and I agree with you 100%. A lot of good application/utilities in the past were from engineers who needed the tools themselves, developed them, and then released it open source.
But I can also see the clutter argument. Windows app store has been and still is a nightmare to use.
It feels like we had a good system, but then lost it. I have no idea what it takes to get it back.
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> Then why does a multi-trillion dollar conglomerate need that pittance from a million ordinary people?
Because the store gets spammed by million of bot applications ? Having a small fee for store review is probably a decent noise floor.
You can still develop apps on your devices without a dev license - the week long cert is annoying, they probably want to avoid people side-loading via this mechanism (which I am against FWIW).
But you can develop on your devices without paying 100$/year
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> and I am sure it cuts down on spammers
Okay, just so we're all on the same page: that 100 dollar fee IS NOT for publishing your app. That's not what that is. That's a separate thing with its own costs.
That 100 dollars is just the fee to even make an app. Even if your iPhone never has an Internet connection. And even if you literally load the app via USB to your iPhone only.
It's just extortion. It cannot be justified. Apple does it because they can - there are zero technical reasons behind it.
> That 100 dollars is just the fee to even make an app. Even if your iPhone never has an Internet connection. And even if you literally load the app via USB to your iPhone only.
This is incorrect.
You make it sound like you cannot even get started unless you pay a $100 fee. You do not need to pay Apple any fees to make an app and put it on your own device. You have to pay the fee once you want to distribute it on the App Store.
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We are not talking about software distribution or admitting it to a store, we're talking about executing something on your own device, a device that you purchased.
You can do that without dev license ?
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>This is why I switched to Android, just for Google now to pull the rug from under my feet again
1) You can continue to install unsigned APKs via adb with the upcoming update.
2) Signing APKs for sideloading requires a Google development account which is a one time fee of $25, no yearly fees.
So still a free sideloading option available, and if you want to avoid adb it is a one time cost that is 1/4 the annual rate on Apple.
I would call it "free developer experience" (using ADB), not "free sideloading".
If you want to send your app to a friend to download and install it directly on their phone (without using a computer with ADB), you need to be Google-approved and register your app first.
OP I was replying to presented his scenario of self developing an app he uses on his own personal device, my response was specifically in regards to that use case, not any hypothetical third party person.
I think you could use adb over tcp from a chroot in the phone itself? But that doesn't really make it easier from their standpoint, and this is just a step towards full lockdown which is coming.
1) Oh yes of course, here friend you just need a PC and the command line tools (unless soon you'll need to be a registered and VERIFIED developer) to install revanced or any open source app
2) Unless they decide to ban you (they can if you don't show any activity in the developer account for X months) and of course because you were verified you can't simply apply again and pay again, because you were banned!!!!
1) OP indicated his scenario was a self developed app he uses on his own personal device, not a hypothetical "friend". In terms of some unknown future scenario, speculative fear doesn't really provide anything in the ways of a constructive dialog.
2) In regards to inactive accounts, from Google's policy page:
>If you have never submitted an app for review and the account is more than one year old, it’s considered inactive.
>If you have apps, the account is considered inactive if it is more than one year old, all published apps have fewer than 1,000 combined lifetime installs, the required contact details are not verified, and you have not used Play Console in the last 180 days.
>Google sends warning emails at 60, 30, and 7 days before actual closure, allowing time to take corrective actions.
While you are correct that this would lose you access to the developer account, inactivity for a year and ignoring multiple warning messages over a 2 month period gives you an opportunity to weigh your options. It doesn't even require app updates, just activity in the Play console.
First they came for F-droid...
This is the obvious problem.