Comment by mike_hearn
17 hours ago
It's not redundant and he isn't disagreeing with your opinion about openness. He's saying that it's immoral to want to force your personal preferences about phone design on other people.
Buying a phone you like? Moral.
Trying to force every phone to be one you like? Immoral.
That's all it's about. Not a difference in definitions or confusing on his part, he's just saying you've got morality all wrong and need to reconsider your position.
Again, my comment that he responded to literally was just making a claim that the iPhone ecosystem is not going to become more open due to voting with one's wallet. Yes, I obviously also think it should be more open, and that's an opinion that someone can strongly disagree with, but that's not what I was saying in the comment he responded to, because whether an action is moral or not is irrelevant to the question of whether it would produce a certain effect.
My point in the comment you responded to is that if person A says "we need to eat more vegetables to be healthy", person B says "no, you will be healthy if you only eat meat", and person C says "I tried only eating meat and I was unhealthy, so I think that's evidence that meat alone might not make you healthy", it's a non-sequitur to respond to person C by saying "it's immoral for you to say someone else should eat vegetables". If you responded to person A saying that, it wouldn't be as weird, but to remain silent when person A and B are debating the health effects of vegetables but then suddenly take issue with person C trying to provide evidence about whether the claims for A and B are correct or when they didn't introduce the topic that you have moral opinions on is very weird.
That is like saying prosecuting murder is immoral because it is taking away the murderer and victims rights.
For a society to function there needs to be balance. ‘You can do whatever you want as long as enough people pay you to cover your bills’ gets bleak fast.
Many people benefit from Apple's closed system. Especially when you look at the malware and viruses that don't exist, because it's so protected.
It's a net benefit for society, even if you don't personally like it.
> Especially when you look at the malware and viruses that don't exist, because it's so protected.
There are fewer viruses on Linux than on Windows, despite being far more open. I imagine your response will be that there are a lot more iPhone users than Linux ones, but my point is that there are a lot more factors than treating "open or closed" as a binary, and at best you can make a principled hypothesis about why something doesn't exist. For all you know, maybe making it more open would allow security researchers to find and report more potential attack vectors; extra attention from being more widely used cuts both ways.
I think you have entirely the wrong comment chain and poster in mind with your response.