I am not, nor have I ever been, a big fan of Apple. (apart from all the usuall complaints, I am one of those freaks who just doesn't like Apple's interface & design). But this is a step in the right direction. Would it be better if it were more open? sure. Is it useless if it isn't? not really, it still protects the users and puts pressure on other manufacturers to do something similar.
Who knows, maybe internally they're even looking at making things more open but that could require a lot more work w.r.t. scanning for patents and such in their code and perhaps they want to have a strong solid release of whatever they would consider a "full system" before they put up their code for all to see.
Apple doen't, historically, have much of a history of opening up but they did open up Swift recently. Perhaps new winds are starting to blow like they did at Microsoft.
This is all a waste and show off as far as I'm concerned until they go open on everything.
What would that bring them? Other companies would rip off iOS, bastardize & put their slow skins on it, and never release security updates (or modified source files).
I agree that opening up security infrastructure would be good though.
I agree with you that there is no privacy protection one can rely against the highest level state actor threats without open tools for privacy.
BUT Apple appears to be effective at keeping the contents of smartphones out of the hands of police and prosecutors and out of the courts. If you can't distinguish between those levels of protection, you are allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
I'm inclined to agree in that they can't really be trusted if they can't be thoroughly audited and all the lockdown is an obstruction to that.
On the other hand I think they could really be doing good things behind the veils, and that could benefit very large numbers of people who don't have the knowledge or inclination to defend their own communications, (and anyone who has the knowledge and inclination but also the misfortune of needing to communicate with those who don't).
I don't know anything about Jacobs beyond what we've just seen here, but I would guess someone who has worked on that level with Open Whisper Systems wouldn't be prone to accepting poor security design, nor to accepting unethical practices in handling user information. I'd be much happier with an open Apple Inc. too, but as long as it keeps standing for a closed and locked environment, Jacobs seems like just the kind of person I would want working there.
I'm a big fan of using open source software to build a business on - particularly BSD/MIT/Apache (aka "permissive") licenses - but the idea that "Open Source === Audited" is laughable.
How many huge bugs have been discovered in very widely used open source libraries/applications and identified as having affected the software for many years?
Would you be satisfied if Apple provided the option for NDA-sealed access to the source, allowing people/researchers to view (but not redistribute) their stack?
Who knows, maybe internally they're even looking at making things more open but that could require a lot more work w.r.t. scanning for patents and such in their code and perhaps they want to have a strong solid release of whatever they would consider a "full system" before they put up their code for all to see.
Apple doen't, historically, have much of a history of opening up but they did open up Swift recently. Perhaps new winds are starting to blow like they did at Microsoft.