[pohl]

I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't.

The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform.

That makes no sense. I could see how it would be hypocrisy if Microsoft forbade middleware and Apple complained about whether or not it was right for Microsoft to do so.

But it is not hypocrisy to enforce different rules for your own platform product than those for a competitors. There are no moral claims involved here.

[andreyf]

I strongly disagree with the author, but I grasp his point of view. Let me try to explain it.

There exists an ideology of "open is always better than closed": open source is better than closed source, open formats are better than proprietary formats, etc. When Jobs talks about WebKit/SquirrelFish being open source implementations of open standards, he is, intentionally or not, appealing to that audience.

But obviously, Steve doesn't believe that open is always better than closed: for example, in the iPhone OS, in the AppStore, and in the H.264 video formats, he's relying on closed and proprietary systems for practical benefit. To those, like RMS, who want the open/closed heuristic used globally and without considering any other variables, this is hypocritical - you say you support openness in one area, but not another. To the people that care about end-user experience more than open/closed systems, such hypocrisy is just common sense.

Personally, I think we should strive for cooperation between the "pure morality" point of view of Stallman, and from the "practical morality" point of view of industry. I've been both a paying member of the FSF and a big fan of the Apple's ecosystem of products since high school: the two are free to pursue their own goals independently, and work together to the fullest extent that shareholder interests align with open-source morality.

A great example such a beautifully aligned interest is Google's rumored opening of the VP8 codec - it will both save Google oodles of bandwidth and storage in the long-run, and be great step for the open ecosystem. It's also important to remember, however, that the reason On2 was able to get investors to pay for the development of VP8 is because of the IP protections they received. Without those, Google would have had to fund/organize/oversee such development in-house instead of letting a free market of startups and investors do a lot of the managing/evaluating/choosing for them.

[doki_pen]

Jobs implies something when he says that he thinks the web "should" be open. He doesn't say it's better for Apple if it's open. Anyway, what is the point? Shouldn't we all have our own self interest in mind and not Apple's? What do I care if it benefits Apple if it doesn't benefit me? The argument should be about whether we should accept what is happening lying down, or if we should try to resist it. Just because it makes sense for Apple to behave this way, doesn't mean that we should accept it.

Edit: It has nothing to do with morality. It's my own vested self interest that makes me wary of Apple. To bring up morality is a way of minimizing my views.

[duairc]

I'm not sure I really get what you're saying either. You're asserting everything should be open ("pure morality") and "industry" ("practical morality") are somehow at opposite ends of a spectrum, and that it would be good if we somehow strove to be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.

[vorador]

I'm not sure to get your point : for instance, why a closed-source iphoneOS would be better than an open one ?

[binspace]

The problem with H.264 is there is a conflict of interest involved. Microsoft and Apple have lots of money riding on the adoption of H.264. If it is the standard, they directly profit.

In the medium to long term, end-user quality is negatively affected by adopting close standards.

[binspace]

Also, the lawyers have promised to basically sue open source developers who do not pay royalties.

[astrange]

Mozilla and Opera have promised everyone that they would be sued for royalties (and there's no reason not to believe them), but I've never seen evidence of this. Nobody is ever going to sue Perian/ffdshow/VLC for royalties.

[robryan]

Still, even if they probably won't get sued they would always have it hanging over their heads. Making an investment in technologies which even have a small chance of causing legal trouble at some point in the future could be a bad bet for them.

[VictorHo]

From dictionary.com:

hy·poc·ri·sy   [hi-pok-ruh-see] –noun,plural-sies.

1. a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.

2. a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.

3. an act or instance of hypocrisy.

I don't see how the author misuses the word "hypocrisy" at all. It appears to me that his case relates to #2 above - Jobs pretends to hold an attitude promoting open standards etc. when that is not the real motivation behind his actions at all.

[KirinDave]

That sort of presupposes a tone of sanctimony that I really don't get from the letter. I don't think Apple is trying to argue they're doing some kind of overall good, they've written a letter about how Flash conflicts with their strategic vision for their platform.

What specific parts do you think suggest feigned virtue? The parts where he claims to want a better environment for developers? That's the only place where I think you might have a toehold.

It must sort of suck to be Apple community relations right now. If you act according to your business plan, you get railed at for being imperious and arbitrary. If you then explain that business plan and your rationale, people immediately see it's not all nobility and grace and get pissed. The brand perception and loyalty that Apple has spent so much time building can certainly be a double-edged sword.

[nosnih]

What many people seem to be missing or ignoring is that he is primarily talking about Flash content on websites.

Jobs said all standards pertaining to the web should be open, not all software. He admits that they have proprietary systems for native apps.

Apple believes that browsing the web should not require a proprietary plugin. I don't see any hypocrisy in that.

[boredguy8]

Neal Stephenson, "Diamond Age"

"You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices," Finkle-McGraw said. "It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others--after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?"

...

"Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour--you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.

...

"We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception--he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing."

"That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code," Major Napier said, working it through, "does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code." "Of course not," Finkle-McGraw said. "It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved--the missteps we make along the way--are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power." All three men were quiet for a few moments, chewing mouthfuls of beer or smoke, pondering the matter.

(http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2006/03/21/hypocrisy_is_the_gre...)

[donaq]

Those are some very interesting quotes. Now, the question is, which definition of hypocrisy applies to Jobs?

[Nwallins]

Is it not hypocritical to hold others to higher standards than one demonstrates?

I see a normative claim:

    Software systems should do X, Y, and Z

Software systems that do not meet the norm are penalized or disallowed by Apple's platform(s). However, Apple's own software does not meet this norm either, even on Apple's own platform.

It sure seems like hypocrisy to me, even if it is defensible.

[pohl]

Why bother inventing an abstract normative claim when you can quote the actual (and only) one that appears in the document:

   "...we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open."

Now, proceed from there.

[cageface]

Why does Apple get to define the boundaries in this debate? What entitles them to demand that standards in the domain of competitor's products must be open whereas standards in their own business domain need not?

I agree that the web should be built on open standards but for exactly the same reasons that digital audio and video and mobile computing ecologies should also be open.

[pohl]

Why does Apple get to define the boundaries in this debate?

The simple fact that the present article accuses them of hypocrisy. For the accusation to stick, one must compare their actions to what they actually say - not to what we erroneously infer from it, or to some semantic-changing paraphrase, or to outright straw men - but to what they actually profess.

Yes, there is a larger debate about software freedom, but there are many of us who value the proprietary software model and open standards and free software for different reasons and in different contexts, so people who are dogmatic one way or the other don't get to set the terms of the debate either.

Regardless, the larger debate is not germane to the current accusation. Retreating to the larger debate does not help make the accusation stick - it's just a way of changing the subject while making it seem as though you have not.

[cageface]

The logical contortions Apple apologists are willing to perform in their defense at this point are truly impressive.

[pohl]

If the logic is truly contorted, you should be able to do better than ad hominem.

[Qz]

Apple is attempting to define the boundaries with all these statements. If they say it enough and people don't call them on it then that will become the de facto truth.

The reality is that they want full control of products they make, and 'open standards' for products that they don't make. Nothing to do with the supposed benefits of 'open'-ness, entirely to do with that is and is not under their control.

[Nwallins]

I think it's clear that a norm of using the Cocoa API is implied here:

> Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago

I was thinking specifically of the Cocoa norm -- which iTunes apparently does not meet -- I should have made that more clear.

How much more open is H.264 than SWF and FLV, anyway?

> Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe

Assuming Jobs is not declaring an obvious tautology, he is omitting FOSS efforts such as Gnash and Swfdec.

[pohl]

I think it's clear that a norm of using the Cocoa API is implied here:

I don't think it's that clear. I think it's more likely that it's a practical reason for the last sentence of he preceding paragraph:

Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

They are establishing Adobe's track record of keeping current on underlying platform enhancements.

[Nwallins]

> I think it's more likely that it's a practical reason

> They are establishing Adobe's track record of keeping current on underlying platform enhancements.

None of that refutes whether or not Apple considers using the Cocoa API exclusively as a norm. I think it's quite clear that they do. Are you really suggesting otherwise?

[pohl]

While the carbon APIs still ship, they are deprecated in favor of Cocoa. Yes, this is true. This fact does not give the author any traction, however, because neither the Finder nor iTunes is a platform that any significant apps depend on. This makes updating them an entirely different engineering decision compared to allowing middleware to introduce dependencies beyond Apple's control.

[randallsquared]

Is it not hypocritical to hold others to higher standards than one demonstrates?

I would say it's hypocritical to hold those of a class including yourself to standards which you do not meet. That is, it's not hypocritical (however blameworthy it may or may not be) to say, "Everyone but me should do X, while I should do Y," but it is to say "Everyone should do X" while actually doing Y.

You can see Jobs trying to avoid hypocrisy in the original post by asserting that web standards should be open, while other software systems have no such obligation.

[demallien]

You're talking about the adoption of Cocoa and the fact that iTunes still uses Carbon? It's not really a fair accusation. I think Apple would very much like to be able to rewrite iTunes in Cocoa, but they have a problem - it's a cross-platform application. As a result they have chosen to use an API on the Mac that most closely resembles an API available on Windows. They know that iTunes is not exploiting the features available on both platforms to their fullest - perhaps painfully so. It is precisely this type of experience which makes them wish to avoid cross-platform development on their new platform.

I mean Apple really does care about the user experience, more so than any other company that I can think of. And yet even they have not managed to put together a good user experience for their cross-platform app. On the Mac it isn't hooked up to all of the Cocoa hotness, and on the PC, well, the less said, the better.

It is Apple's firsthand experience with the problems you can have during cross-platform development that is informing their decision to strongly discourage such development on the iPhone platform.

[orangecat]

The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest

And Mac apps. iTunes and Final Cut Pro are still 32-bit Carbon, with no indication of that changing anytime soon.

[carussell]

Maybe it's wrong of me to be pointing out votes, but it really irks me that the original comment is at 46 as of this writing, while yours is at 4.

So I want to comment in favor of stressing the above comments, hard. Considering a substantial discussion of the semantics of the word "hypocrisy" followed, with some people taking one side, and some the other, let's make a correction to the original presumption so that even those who didn't believe it to be hypocritical can come into agreement.

"The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform." is false. The claim is that since Apple ships major OS X apps that don't use Cocoa, it's hypocrisy to attack Adobe on those grounds.

Edit: Actually Jobs's words chide Adobe as "the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X", so the debate might be a little bit more than moot. I still think it's entirely fair, though, to ask of Apple in the same vein, "Hey, why so late for you guys to fully adopt Mac OS X?"

[glhaynes]

The very fact that those are some of the things that have been criticized the most (the list would have had to have included Finder until a few months ago!) and with many cries to have them converted to Cocoa may reveal hypocrisy but it also proves Jobs' point: cross-platform, least-common-denominator stuff almost never provides the level of enjoyment that native, non-legacy stuff does.

Many think the web has proven that cross-platform apps are fine. It hasn't — the web is its own platform.

[zmmmmm]

> it also proves Jobs' point: cross-platform, least-common-denominator stuff almost never provides the level of enjoyment that native, non-legacy stuff does

Not really. If the difference was that big, he would have devoted resources to porting his own software. Being the perfectionist he is, and not porting his own software, one has to conclude the differences just aren't that big.

[astrange]

The difference in maintainability is pretty big - iTunes and FCP are some of Apple's oldest application codebases at this point and both probably need a total rewrite to be up to their modern standards and work with 64-bit/background threading/etc. (They also both started out at other companies, though who knows what that means.)

I assume the reason they haven't been rewritten is the same reason that QuickTime 10 isn't finished yet. But I don't know what that reason is.

[telemachos]

You seem to believe that 'hypocrisy' (and related words, I assume) can only apply to moral claims.

That isn't true to the best of my knowledge, and a check of a handful of good dictionaries (online and paper) confirms this.

Here's one link, for example: http://dictionaries.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=hypocrisy*1...

Although the charge of hypocrisy often comes up in moral contexts, that isn't a requirement.

[dasil003]

The older I get the more convinced I am that it's possible to define anyone as a hypocrite simply by repeatedly moving to a higher abstraction until you find a layer where what someone says and what they do are not in sync, and then you can righteously declare "hypocrite!", even though the actual conflict was generated by creative semantics (which all higher thought is).

Therefore in order for a hypocrisy to be a useful word I think it needs a more rigorous connotation. I'm not saying the moral angle is the correct one, but I certainly think that Jobs' letter is far from any reasonably useful definition hypocrisy.

[telemachos]

You're asking for a redefinition or sharpening of a word that is often used in a sloppy way. That's fine - and potentially very useful.

But my point was more limited: the parent poster writes as though vast numbers of people don't understand the simple concept of hypocrisy. That might be fine, too, except that it's his definition of 'hypocrisy' that is non-standard.

[_pius]

I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't.

Indeed, "tu quoque" fail abounds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

[cageface]

Merriam Webster defines hypocrisy thus:

"feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion"

I'd say Apple's lambasting of Adobe for failing to provide open & reliable cross-platform software fits the bill perfectly. Steve's critique of Flash can be both accurate and hypocritical at the same time.

[pohl]

Apple's lambasting of Adobe for failing to provide open & reliable cross-platform software

I think a quotation to support your interpretation above would be helpful, because it's not at all what I read in "Thoughts on Flash" today.

That is, I did not get the impression that Apple thought Adobe ought to deliver anything open. They were merely pointing out that it is not — and that this does not meet Apple's vision for what they want to support within Mobile Safari.

In fact, he went so far as to concede that "Apple has many proprietary products too."

[_pius]

Steve's critique of Flash can be both accurate and hypocritical at the same time.

Great point, actually.

[acg]

Hypocrisy is not reserved for moral claims. Jobs could be making a virtue out of openness (I'm not sure he is) or saying one thing in public and acting differently in private. Both of which, without moral claims, could cause him to be a hypocrite. Jobs could be called a hypocrite in two different senses depending on how cynical you are.

[pohl]

I'll concede that the claim does not need to be moral, but it should, at least, be a claim about what ought to be or what one ought to do.

It's not enough, for example, for me to wax eloquent about how much I love the color green while I'm wearing a purple shirt. It is possible, after all, to love both open models and closed models in different contexts.

[acg]

To deride Adobe for not porting applications to Cocoa and for Apple not to have: that is hypocritical. Only one example in the article. I don't see the problem of usage.

[telemachos]

I'll concede that the claim does not need to be moral, but it should, at least, be a claim about what ought to be or what one ought to do.

But the author meets this standard. For example, he points out that Jobs says, in effect, that Adobe should have moved their Carbon apps to Cocoa, even though Apple hasn't done so in some cases.

[pohl]

Note that you have to use the weasel-phrase "in effect" to put words in the mouth of Jobs and claim that "the author meets this standard". If you're so certain he's met the standard, provide an actual quotation rather than a straw man.

Jobs made no such statement. Rather, he observed that Adobe was very slow in passing Apple's platform improvements on to its customers, and the implication here is that it would be unwise for Apple to allow middleware to put Apple in a position where Adobe could do the same thing again for thousands of apps.

But he made no claim about what Adobe ought to have done, or should have done. Rather, he gave a reason for the policy decisions that Apple has made.

[telemachos]

Here is Steve Jobs verbatim: And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

What the author points out is that it's odd (hypocritical?) for Jobs to pick on Adobe as the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X when Apple itself has not finished that transition (iTunes) and was very slow to do so in some cases (Finder).

I did use "in effect" to avoid going back and getting a quotation. I was lazy. But the quotation is there. I think it's overkill to describe me as using a straw man argument.

[pohl]

The author is wrong here, because that sentence exists to support the decision to not allow Adobe to interpose themselves between Apple's platform APIs and developers. Neither the Finder nor iTunes presented an impediment to improving the platform because neither of them interpose in any significant manner. That they have managed to bring MacOS X this far without touching them is evidence of this.

Regardless, Apple's own development is under Apple's own control. The current question is why they are not willing to be at the mercy of a vendor that is not only beyond Apple's control, but also has an established history of lagging. You may not like their decision, but it is prudent, consistent with their stated values, and consistent with their actions.

The author did not understand the function of this paragraph, and based his attack on a faulty interpretation.

I'm surprised that so many denizens of HN seem to be having trouble with the concept of a chain of dependencies, and how that makes the cases of iTunes and the Finder very different.

[zzleeper]

Isn't it hypocrisy to criticize someone for doing the very same thing you are doing? (ie, taking ages to adopt cocoa fully).

It's even worst if you are supposed to be leading by example, as cocoa is apple's own design.

[crad]

Right, not using all the tools available in an OS is quite different than not being able to do so because of the development environment.

[pohl]

See...in the subtext of your post, there is the ghost of a moral claim. † So now we're getting close to the requirements for hypocrisy. Now you would just need to create a closed platform and ship it.

† One that Jobs did not make, and that I do not agree with — I think any platform can make its own rules, and game consoles have set the precedent for the more closed model.

[Confusion]

It's so hard to grasp that the author even uses 'hypercritical' as an adjective to denote an instance of hypocrisy.

[mascarenhas]

This was obviously a typo to me, I just skipped it and kept reading. By now several other comments here have shown that the Jobs' letter is indeed hypocritical by the accepted definitions of the term. I will even link another one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy.

[CamperBob]

The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform.

There were many good points in the article, and that's only one of them. Thoughts on the others, particularly the 'openness' of H.264 or lack thereof?

[binspace]

Steve Jobs is trumpeting open standards for the web yet supporting closed standards, hence the hypocrisy.