Re:Apple Under Siege
by nemothekid on Sunday October 06, 2013 @07:37PM
(#6505900)
>Things like iMessage and FaceTime would be decent products if they opened the protocols and let others complete.
Why? AFAIK, there are already open standards for messaging and for a long time they were supported out of the box for OS X. I'm not trying to excuse Apple's action here, but is it better for Apple to open their implementation, or is it better for the open source community? In other words, are there specific use cases that would benefit many users (not just joe who wants to run iMessage on X) or, does the open source community just want a messaging protocol that is backed by a corporation with a lot of presence?
Is user-to-user messaging such a complex service that the need for Apple to open their implementation that great? When you say "competition" who would Apple be competing against? G Talk? WhatsApp? Kik? and what would they be competing for? Users? if the implementation is really open, the number of users doesn't really matter. Money? Apple already provides the service for free.
In short, I don't really understand the benefits of having Apple open their protocol, but there are already downsides for the user, the strongest being, Apple is no longer a central authority for messages meaning things like simply syncing messages across devices becomes a harder.
Why? AFAIK, there are already open standards for messaging and for a long time they were supported out of the box for OS X. I'm not trying to excuse Apple's action here, but is it better for Apple to open their implementation, or is it better for the open source community? In other words, are there specific use cases that would benefit many users (not just joe who wants to run iMessage on X) or, does the open source community just want a messaging protocol that is backed by a corporation with a lot of presence?
Is user-to-user messaging such a complex service that the need for Apple to open their implementation that great? When you say "competition" who would Apple be competing against? G Talk? WhatsApp? Kik? and what would they be competing for? Users? if the implementation is really open, the number of users doesn't really matter. Money? Apple already provides the service for free.
In short, I don't really understand the benefits of having Apple open their protocol, but there are already downsides for the user, the strongest being, Apple is no longer a central authority for messages meaning things like simply syncing messages across devices becomes a harder.