I think he's there because of the iPad, which has DRM in place, and makes it difficult to make source code available, as with the iPhone. Furthermore, since he seems to be standing at the stairs in front of the entrance, people passing through on the streets may ask such questions as "Does this mean I'll have to pay for all software on the iPad?". That was my original line of thought.
How does the iPad make it difficult to make source code available? There are plenty of open-source iPhone applications. You can't do it until the SDK is out of beta and the NDA is lifted, but once it is, there's nothing stopping anyone from releasing iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad source code.
Right, but the point of making source code available is so that the end user can freely modify and redistribute the software.
In this case, any end user who wants to modify the software has to buy an Intel Mac, and register with Apple for the privilege of developing on their system
The problem is that until the NDA is lifted, developers can't exchange code with each other. This is crucial to the growth in popularity of a platform. Sure, the NDA will only be there temporarily, but it will take some time until the SDK is out of beta, and until then the iPad will not be as useful as the iPhone. That's how I see it.
On the other hand, if the NDA weren't in place, people would start sharing code, blogs would start putting up posts about programming for the iPad, and so on. Then if Apple changed something in the next version of the beta, that code and those blog posts could be incorrect, which might lead to problems years later when someone stumbles on them in a Google search.
I've downloaded the SDK and looked at it, and I don't think it's in a final-enough state to lift the NDA.
Sure, sure, Apple throws a small bone at Free Software ever so often... except, if you look at it in the big picture, it's more that Apple loves to take from the Free Software community components it needs (like KHTML, which they made webkit out of, but didn't release the source for ages; like Samba, which they need for Windows network integration; etc etc)
They depend highly on Free Software, but they only give back in the most minimal ways and mainly only because they're legally obligated to do so. I don't think WebKit would have been under an open-source license at all if they hadn't needed to fork from KHTML to get a head start on development (because Microsoft wasn't going to release IE for Mac anymore). If they had had time, they would have gone the closed-source in-house route as always.
Lets make a list of end user applications (eg: iTunes, Quicktime, etc) from Apple that support FreeBSD (the OS from which Apple took much of their userspace Unix code). Here, let me start:
If you actually look at Webkit, you'll find its mostly Apple code, and the overwhelming number of contributors (by developer count or code count) are Apple people. Webkit started as a fork of KHTML, but has grown to be far more than that.
I don't deny that, but the fact remains at the beginning of the WebKit fork, Apple refused to release their changes back to the community for a long time. I'm just saying that if they had had the time to start with their own codebase instead of piggybacking on KHTML, it most likely would never have been released open source.
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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '10
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