Comments on: The Joy of Interpretation

By: Chris McCormick

Chris McCormick — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:43:31 +0000

Alex, thanks for this great distillation of the problem! Very objective.

By: _marks

_marks — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 05:22:56 +0000

thanks for the thread alex. this lame apple policy sickens and angers me daily, and i say that as a big fan of apple products and a shareholder even!! allow me to rant.

A. dave, i agree with you — how do we get non-programmers to care? turn everyone into programmers? it seems that only programmers are aware of the serious limitations on freedom being perpetrated here, because non-programmers didn’t have the freedom to program the device in the first place due to lack of knowledge. kinda hard to get mad about not being able to do something you don’t care about doing.

B. i’m hopeful that competitive devices from google will be more hacker friendly, although i haven’t looked into this yet.

C. note that apple is selectively enforcing the interpretation/execution restriction. for example, the C64 emulator was initially banned for including the BASIC interpreter (i mean, c’mon what could more clearly illustrate the inanity of the policy?), but was accepted after the BASIC interpreter was removed, despite the fact that the sole purpose of the remainder of the application is obviously to execute interpreted code. see also the recently released intellivision app. which makes it seem that what They oppose is not really interpreters at all but End User Programmability, which is simply disgusting.

D. when i first heard of this policy, i thought it was so lame and retrograde that it must be coming from AT&T as part of letting the devices onto their network. it is looking less and less likely that that is the case. sigh.

By: Richard Lewis

Richard Lewis — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:06:37 +0000

There's a rumor some similar restrictions could be built in (at kernel level) to Mac OS 10.7. It's certainly a worthy cause to fight to protect your freedom to program your own computer. A rule of thumb: if you can't hack it, don't buy it.

By: Loup Vaillant

Loup Vaillant — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:35:09 +0000

> Why is programming being discriminated against here?

Because the control of programming means the control of the computer, and, ultimately, control over the life of the “owner” of the computer. (Yes, I take the iPhone and the iPad for computers, in the full sense of the word). Basically what Treacherous Computing is all about.

By: J. Karck

J. Karck — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:37:11 +0000

I am concerned about how it is ok to discriminate against creating software, but not against creating text, pictures, movies, playing games, painting, sculpting, solving puzzles in math games, doing some math.

Why is programming being discriminated against here?

By: anonymous

anonymous — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:24:13 +0000

The FSF has software freedoms and they demonstrate what people need in order to properly share.

The removal of scratch from the app store mattered.

Sadly people just don’t see why they need software freedom.

If we had software freedom on apple’s devices we wouldn’t be debating this.

By: dave

dave — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:52:16 +0000

We need to figure out ways to communicate these issues to normal users. I see this "no user serviceable parts" attitude a dangerous one from car engines to the iphone. I understand the business models that make them attractive, but they are not for the interests of anything other than those business models, and have a feeling they will get us into serious trouble one day. One example is a project in Brazil called MetaReciclagem which teaches children how to build and program computers using free software and recycled desktop parts. How will this be possible if everyone uses laptops or even worse, locked down devices? Is this sort of project out of date, should we leave knowledge of these devices to those who are "fully qualified"? I guess it's not a huge problem as not many people really use computers to run anything important on (like *their entire lives*) these days...