Good. After the geohot disaster, I sold my PS3 and all the games I had, my vaio laptop, and my flatscreen TV. I refuse to patronize a company that abuses it's customers like that. Apple may have a reputation for disliking people who hack their products but they realized if they pursue legal action against them, they'd alienate the core base of developers they rely on for the Apps they make such a big deal about.
As someone that has been involved it in hacking apple products and making some pocket change from it in a past life, I hardly think apple has a reputation for disliking these people.
If anything, apple looks at what people come up with 'off the ranch' and pulls it into their own stuff if they like it. Apple may have this 'reputation,' but it's purely because the press wants to have it painted this way. I'm no fanboy or anything, I've had a business crushed at their hands; as an engineer and a business guy, I find their decisions to be relatively rational and I was well aware of what was coming well before it was delivered.
People like to point to the guy on top as big and evil. Rightnow it's Apple, 12-15 years ago it was Microsoft. Tomorrow it could be Google.
But it certainly sounds like as if you are an Apple fanboy. Apple do hate hacking on their products, restrictions of using itunes for anything Apple is something I just can't bear with, along with restrictions like using OS/X for developing iphone/ipod apps.
To add to bonzoesc, who likes their product getting hacked? It's a business and they're trying to make money. The business plans on these high profile products with years of dev time are made years in advance. In technology, that's a lifetime, and in hardware doing pivots isn't trivial.
There's also very real concerns regarding hacking - i.e. you want to avoid getting the rep for being that company responsible (think Sidekick) for the Paris Hilton situation, where all of hollywood's A-list celebrities phone numbers get leaked onto the internet. You're trying to build a secure device.
The business motivations are obvious. Apple builds a good closed system. Google builds a janky open system. Both models work, neither is right or wrong, and both companys go to the bank.
And just to put things into perspective, there was no App Store when Apple launched the iphone. I'm pretty sure they never intended for there to be, but once they saw what people were coming up with 'off the ranch' it became fairly obvious to them to let developers develop on their platform. The reason I'm fairly certain Apple had no initial plans for this is simply because, on the version of the first public firmware (and only the first one), everything ran as root user... that's just idiotic.
Ignoring the impossibility of a publicly-held company "hating" things, if Apple "hated" iOS jailbreaking/hacking, there'd be members of the teams that develop the techniques and capabilities in court just like geohot.
The iTunes cracking restrictions are probably related to their contracts with providers selling stuff on the iTunes store. The requirement to use iTunes for managing iOS devices is simply because no other software has been written to do it.
The market will decide. The market is the final judge on all decisions. Sometimes it takes a little longer for the dust to settle, but if a decision ended up being a bad decision then either change or get owned for it.
businesses aren't democratic, plain and simple. If that had been the government saying you couldn't publish your book about Islam or Judaism or something, then that's something to get up in arms about.
With Hymn, I suspect Apple only had two options: (1) go after them, or (2) get out of the music distribution business. At the time, the people who owned the music Apple distributed required Apple to use DRM. I'd be shocked if the license they gave Apple did not include a requirement that Apple do everything it could reasonably do technically and legally to try to keep the DRM effective.
As for Psystar, what about them? Apple has not gone after the hackers who figure out how to run OS X on non-Mac hardware. They've not gone after the numerous web sites that tell you how to do it. They've not gone after the book you can readily buy at B&N or Amazon on building a hackintosh. They've mostly looked the other way (hell, they have even been known to include in OS X updates bug fixes for problems that only manifested themselves on non-Apple hardware). It sure doesn't look like Apple has much of a problem with people hacking.
I don't think that's really a good comparison of what happened with Kali, battle.net etc. (there was actually another one before Kali but I can't remember it's name).
It's more like a great indy iPhone app that increases the value of the phone and even becomes one of the reasons people are buying the phone. Then Apple decides to build the same functionality right into the phone making the app obsolete. That's a much better analogy.
Now I'm not against Apple doing that at all. In fact I think it's a no-brainer, and failing to do it would be disappointing. It's just a shame that the little indy guys who created that market for them get shut out. Toss them a couple million bucks or something you know?
False. They may not make money in the same way, but they definitely make money off of app developers. The PS3 SDK costs something like $10,000. They also charge royalties against each game sold.
