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by asdff 28 days ago
So sad to me how combative Apple has been towards open source software over the years. The peak of the jailbreak era was imo peak mobile development too. So much innovation and rapid iteration. Anything seemed possible and anything really was possible if you put your mind to it and built the thing. Pretty much any good idea apple integrated into ios has been shamelessly copied without attribute from that crucible of creativity that is the jailbreak community.

But it all hinged on someone coming up with an exploit and releasing it free to the community ignoring any bug bounty. True altruists. And apple is good enough at whack a mole and paying people $100k that this sort of effort died out. Most low hanging fruit all picked and patched already. It is no wonder that ios innovation has also stalled out now that there isn't someone to copy good ideas from any longer.

2 comments

It sucks because for a while, at least in the second jobs era, they seemed to at least hesitantly support foss. They collaborated with KDE, released darwin as free software, and contributed to GCC and then very heavily to LLVM. MacOS, for a while, used an open source init system (systemstarter for a while, then launchd)
I am sure government can regulate such things like they can force Apple to open up their walled garden.
Which governments, though? The US loves these "NOBUS" companies, enforcing Google and Apple's walled garden is part of their agenda.

The hardline opposition like China, Russia and North Korea all have contingency ecosystems they'd rather promote than force Apple to comply with an arbitrary featureset. The EU, for all the good it has done, will have to contend with the US refusing to extend FVEY intelligence to states that resist cooperation.

The four other eyes are most likely already excluding the US at this point given that sharing intelligence with the US almost certainly means sharing it with your enemies.
I doubt that. Most of those governments still rely on US-made software and US-designed hardware, so the NSA's Sword of Damocles is always dangling over their head whether or not their cooperate. The Canadian Sikh murders seem to indicate a level of US-Canada intelligence cooperation that still operates well.

My original statement should have read Nine Eyes or Fourteen Eyes, but the point stands. The US can play hardball behind closed doors and make these nations regret regulation even if it's a good policy.

The four eyes are most likely already excluding the US at this point.
One pair of those eyes is New Zealand. Our PM would do anything Trump asked and there is a track record.

Sadly, it’s down the the other 3 pairs of eye.

I'm sure "the government" (almighty, praised be it's name) is very interested in regulating an industry in order to supplicate your extremely niche hobby.

But faith can move mountains. Maybe you have to sacrifice some goats to the government to have your prayers heard?

It would be refreshing if anyone in government cared about such things.
My hopes are high that the EU will be able to do this some day (unless it's fully enshittified first -- see chat control, age verification etc.)