| > I believe Apple does all of these things to encourage developers to do a better job testing their apps prior to submission and to prevent high volume developers from hogging the review team's time. I'm kind of tired of bring this up, as I'm sure others are tired of the same sort of comments, but the App Store has been bothering me quite a bit lately. This doesn't seem like the way things should work. We shouldn't be spending time thinking up clever and logical explanations of what hoops Apple puts the very developers that make its platform interesting through. Am I wrong? I don't (yet) write iPhone apps, and I am honestly seeking sane opinions of those who do. As a student, I am currently learning everything I can about everything that goes on my computer and how it works, and realizing that almost nothing I currently know would be possible without all the open-source tools that are used in every one of our courses (none of the lab machines in the CS department here run Windows). The very core idea of being able to tinker and learn about each moving part of software, like a mechanism made of semi-transparent gears, is what attracted me personally into the industry in the first place. Developers' ideas seem to only be guided by what they are able to dream up and code, and anyone can participate and improve things collaboratively creating something beautiful and useful. And now I'm learning that one of the supposedly more exciting ways to make a living using the acquired knowledge is to do things in very particular restricted ways, according to the rules set out by one company, using the tools they deemed fit. Perhaps I'm overdramatizing, but there is just something very fishy about the entire concept, and I can't tell whether my confusion stems from lack of knowledge, the fact that I'm looking at it from a fresh point of view that others are just too deep in the trenches to see, or both. |
Where Open Source is supported by companies is where it is a complement to their main line of business. So Google support OS browsers so that people will be online more and click on more ads. IBM likes Linux because people might buy more IBM hardware. 37signals makes web-apps and benefits from Rails. There's enough of those complements (plus altruistic applications -- think Torvalds or _Why) that we have a full ecosystem that everyone benefits from.
The money is in the closed source stuff (Google doesn't OS adsense or their core search or cluster stuff, IBM doesn't OS zOS or WebSphere, 37signals doesn't OS basecamp)