I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't.
The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform.
That makes no sense. I could see how it would be hypocrisy if Microsoft forbade middleware and Apple complained about whether or not it was right for Microsoft to do so.
But it is not hypocrisy to enforce different rules for your own platform product than those for a competitors. There are no moral claims involved here.
I strongly disagree with the author, but I grasp his point of view. Let me try to explain it.
There exists an ideology of "open is always better than closed": open source is better than closed source, open formats are better than proprietary formats, etc. When Jobs talks about WebKit/SquirrelFish being open source implementations of open standards, he is, intentionally or not, appealing to that audience.
But obviously, Steve doesn't believe that open is always better than closed: for example, in the iPhone OS, in the AppStore, and in the H.264 video formats, he's relying on closed and proprietary systems for practical benefit. To those, like RMS, who want the open/closed heuristic used globally and without considering any other variables, this is hypocritical - you say you support openness in one area, but not another. To the people that care about end-user experience more than open/closed systems, such hypocrisy is just common sense.
Personally, I think we should strive for cooperation between the "pure morality" point of view of Stallman, and from the "practical morality" point of view of industry. I've been both a paying member of the FSF and a big fan of the Apple's ecosystem of products since high school: the two are free to pursue their own goals independently, and work together to the fullest extent that shareholder interests align with open-source morality.
A great example such a beautifully aligned interest is Google's rumored opening of the VP8 codec - it will both save Google oodles of bandwidth and storage in the long-run, and be great step for the open ecosystem. It's also important to remember, however, that the reason On2 was able to get investors to pay for the development of VP8 is because of the IP protections they received. Without those, Google would have had to fund/organize/oversee such development in-house instead of letting a free market of startups and investors do a lot of the managing/evaluating/choosing for them.
1. a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.
2. a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.
3. an act or instance of hypocrisy.
I don't see how the author misuses the word "hypocrisy" at all. It appears to me that his case relates to #2 above - Jobs pretends to hold an attitude promoting open standards etc. when that is not the real motivation behind his actions at all.
"You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices," Finkle-McGraw said. "It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others--after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?"
...
"Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour--you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.
...
"We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception--he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing."
"That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code," Major Napier said, working it through, "does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code."
"Of course not," Finkle-McGraw said. "It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved--the missteps we make along the way--are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power." All three men were quiet for a few moments, chewing mouthfuls of beer or smoke, pondering the matter.
Is it not hypocritical to hold others to higher standards than one demonstrates?
I see a normative claim:
Software systems should do X, Y, and Z
Software systems that do not meet the norm are penalized or disallowed by Apple's platform(s). However, Apple's own software does not meet this norm either, even on Apple's own platform.
It sure seems like hypocrisy to me, even if it is defensible.
I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't.
Hypocrisy is not reserved for moral claims. Jobs could be making a virtue out of openness (I'm not sure he is) or saying one thing in public and acting differently in private. Both of which, without moral claims, could cause him to be a hypocrite. Jobs could be called a hypocrite in two different senses depending on how cynical you are.
The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform.
There were many good points in the article, and that's only one of them. Thoughts on the others, particularly the 'openness' of H.264 or lack thereof?
Really? I leave mine running for weeks on end with no issues. I try to keep it up to date but usually let the updates stew for a month before upgrading. iTunes is indispensable software for me, and I don't own an iPhone, iPad, iPod or any of that. Nor do I use it for purchasing music. Strictly as a music organizer/player, I think it is fantastic and integrates perfectly with the operating system.
That being said, the last time I used iTunes on Windows it was about as enjoybable as waiting for a Java Applet to load up.
It sucks much less though. That was one of the biggest surprises I found when I first got an OSX machine, just how much better iTunes runs. It's still not what I'd consider good software, but it's a hell of a lot less bad.
I still can't believe Apple so thoroughly neglects 90% of their customers.
I have often gone directly to the video file and played it directly. It seems to work better than iTunes on OS X. I really wish they would just hire a team to do the look and feel on Windows separately. It would improve both platforms.
I do wonder if the trend to use WebKit for a lot more things will continue.
The author openly conceeds the points that consumers will actually care about - performance, security, and proprietary nature. It's hard to claim that it's a "marketing trick to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers" when you agree with large tracts of the author's argument.
Their main point, that he's somehow a hypocrite because Apple haven't used the latest tech for everything, entirely misses the point he's making - Putting a 3rd party layer between your platform and developers can cause a lag in new features being used. He then states he's mostly worried that Adobe would have really amplified this lag, as "Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms". He doesn't say it's bad that they've been this slow, just that they are this slow. If it takes them 10 years to adopt Cocoa, why would anything in iPhone 4.0 turn up in Flash till 2015? His claim is that middleware lag is a bad thing is not weakened by iTunes for Windows being crappy - if anything, it's strengthened.
He makes his position very clear - "we sell more devices because we have the best apps", and feels they get the best apps without middleware. There's nothing inconsistent with this position, whilst still taking advantage of other platforms lack of restrictions. I'm not even going to deal with the authors claim that h.264 is as proprietary as Flash: A standard that was developed by a committee, in the open, with many implementations and a licensing scheme for anyone, versus a commercial closed product developed by a single company and no competitive implementations? Sure, there's no difference at all there.
I think he mostly argues about the fact that Jobs stated Flash not being and open standard as a reason not to support it. I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been an open standards company and as the author points out, they've mostly stated this for marketing purposes while not fully embracing the idea.
I don't understand the big deal. Do people really love developing in flash that much? Is the flash development community really this big? I have a feeling that a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon because it gets attention.
It is really weird, before this everyone hated flash. It was pretty well accepted as a necessary evil that we all wished we could do without (at least that is the vibe I got). We are now almost able to do without it, and 1 OS maker is trying to push that trend.
The truth is that flash kinda sucks, and it makes the OS look bad, and that is bad for Apple.
The whole article really has nothing to do with Flash. Did you even read it? It's about Jobs saying "this is bad for reasons X, Y, and Z", without acknowledging that Apple is guilty of the exact same BS.
Example - he basically says Adobe sucks because they just finally got around to releasing a full "Cocoa" binary for CS5. And yet Apple has the same problems. The Finder was Carbon until Snow Leopard was released, less than a year ago. And iTunes, arguably their biggest app, is still Carbon. Yet somehow because Adobe still had Carbon apps as of a few weeks ago, they are evil.
iTunes sucks on windows because it does not take advantage of windows. If windows was the iPhone and iTunes was an app it would have been banned a long time ago.
While I do think that the Jobs letter is littered with hypocrisy, I don't think comparing iTunes to Flash is a fair analogy. One is a single self contained application, and the other is a framework/runtime.
What happened to OSNews? I remember it being a pretty good tech news site a while back but now it seems that every day there's another over-written, hyper-ventilating, peanut-gallery-baiting "opinion piece" like this. Good for selling ad impressions I guess.
I stopped reading it a few years ago when the frequency of Thom's rants got too much for me to handle. For example, he was in way over his head when he was trying to describe what his ideal OS of the future would be.
I miss the generally geeky articles on alternative operating systems, but ArsTechnica's open source coverage started to pick up about the time that I stopped reading OSNews that I had pretty much forgotten about it until today. Reading this article made me remember why I stopped going there.
I also do not understand how it's hypocritical unless you believe the idiot assumption that one has to commit fully to open or close standards exclusively. Jobs has a much more pragmatic view and I cannot recall any point in which he suggested otherwise. The one thing his open letter makes clear is that Apple is not very interested in advancing other companies closed platforms especially if it undermines their own. That's completely a completely rational approach. I'm not sure why people are so compelled to project these idealogical purity tests on others. It's childish.
I buy Apple's lines on this one. For long, I've been going "Grrrr...." over Flash heating up my macbook pro when run under MacOSX, but running much cooler (as in temperature) under windows on the exact same hardware. So much for cross-platform-ness.
... and though Apple's comments do mention Adobe taking its time to cocoa-ize its apps, this is clearly about the iPod Touches and iPhones and iPads.
Its sad, however, that in order to do this, Apple has forbidden the entire category of runtimes - including Scratch. Now Alan Kay might be the one going "Grrrrr..."!
I was wholly expecting his argument to address this quote:
If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
MS Windows developers aren’t dependent on some third party cross-platform technology to adopt the latest iTunes APIs changes. Whereas, iPhone developers using third party cross-platform tools such as Adobe’s Flash will be at the mercy of Adobe and can only move as fast as it can. http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/559162861/the-other-thought...
The only people I know defending Adobe and Flash are Flash developers and Adobe itself. Everybody else tolerates Flash begrudgingly. I miss a few flash games here and there on my iPhone. Beyond that, good riddance. Flash is the RealPlayer of the decade.
Defending Flash overall or for iPhone? I hate every Adobe product except Photoshop, yet I still am upset with Apple's decision on blocking other runtimes and forcing C.
The whole article really has nothing to do with Flash. Did you even read it? It's about Jobs saying "this is bad for reasons X, Y, and Z", without acknowledging that Apple is guilty of the exact same BS.
Example - he basically says Adobe sucks because they just finally got around to releasing a full "Cocoa" binary for CS5. And yet Apple has the same problems. The Finder was Carbon until Snow Leopard was released, less than a year ago. And iTunes, arguably their biggest app, is still Carbon. Yet somehow because Adobe still had Carbon apps as of a few weeks ago, they are evil.
I started using Amazon Video which uses flash. I like to be able to view movies and videos I've purchased where ever I am on whatever computer I am, and as of right now that's only possible with flash. I doubt Amazon would make this a direct video since Flash permits some form of rights management for content owners. If it were just a video I could download it and distribute it how I wanted. Which while ultimately is a nice idea but studios would just then not permit things like Amazon Video and so I like that Flash has enabled me to enjoy the content I want the way I can.
YES Thank god. The video codec is 100x worse than flash. At least SWF is open, so you can generate SWF files royalty free from adobe. H264 aint quite that. I tunes sucks, hate it, and no itunes for linux. Hey remember itunes + palm? Yea? We're open my ass. If Apple is so devoted to breaking people free of proprietary crap explain the itunes-palm pre wars.
pohl|16 years ago
The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform.
That makes no sense. I could see how it would be hypocrisy if Microsoft forbade middleware and Apple complained about whether or not it was right for Microsoft to do so.
But it is not hypocrisy to enforce different rules for your own platform product than those for a competitors. There are no moral claims involved here.
andreyf|16 years ago
There exists an ideology of "open is always better than closed": open source is better than closed source, open formats are better than proprietary formats, etc. When Jobs talks about WebKit/SquirrelFish being open source implementations of open standards, he is, intentionally or not, appealing to that audience.
But obviously, Steve doesn't believe that open is always better than closed: for example, in the iPhone OS, in the AppStore, and in the H.264 video formats, he's relying on closed and proprietary systems for practical benefit. To those, like RMS, who want the open/closed heuristic used globally and without considering any other variables, this is hypocritical - you say you support openness in one area, but not another. To the people that care about end-user experience more than open/closed systems, such hypocrisy is just common sense.
Personally, I think we should strive for cooperation between the "pure morality" point of view of Stallman, and from the "practical morality" point of view of industry. I've been both a paying member of the FSF and a big fan of the Apple's ecosystem of products since high school: the two are free to pursue their own goals independently, and work together to the fullest extent that shareholder interests align with open-source morality.
A great example such a beautifully aligned interest is Google's rumored opening of the VP8 codec - it will both save Google oodles of bandwidth and storage in the long-run, and be great step for the open ecosystem. It's also important to remember, however, that the reason On2 was able to get investors to pay for the development of VP8 is because of the IP protections they received. Without those, Google would have had to fund/organize/oversee such development in-house instead of letting a free market of startups and investors do a lot of the managing/evaluating/choosing for them.
VictorHo|16 years ago
hy·poc·ri·sy [hi-pok-ruh-see] –noun,plural-sies.
1. a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.
2. a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.
3. an act or instance of hypocrisy.
I don't see how the author misuses the word "hypocrisy" at all. It appears to me that his case relates to #2 above - Jobs pretends to hold an attitude promoting open standards etc. when that is not the real motivation behind his actions at all.
boredguy8|16 years ago
"You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices," Finkle-McGraw said. "It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others--after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?"
...
"Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour--you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.
...
"We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception--he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing."
"That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code," Major Napier said, working it through, "does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code." "Of course not," Finkle-McGraw said. "It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved--the missteps we make along the way--are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power." All three men were quiet for a few moments, chewing mouthfuls of beer or smoke, pondering the matter.
(http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2006/03/21/hypocrisy_is_the_gre...)
Nwallins|16 years ago
I see a normative claim:
Software systems that do not meet the norm are penalized or disallowed by Apple's platform(s). However, Apple's own software does not meet this norm either, even on Apple's own platform.It sure seems like hypocrisy to me, even if it is defensible.
orangecat|16 years ago
And Mac apps. iTunes and Final Cut Pro are still 32-bit Carbon, with no indication of that changing anytime soon.
telemachos|16 years ago
That isn't true to the best of my knowledge, and a check of a handful of good dictionaries (online and paper) confirms this.
Here's one link, for example: http://dictionaries.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=hypocrisy*1...
Although the charge of hypocrisy often comes up in moral contexts, that isn't a requirement.
_pius|16 years ago
Indeed, "tu quoque" fail abounds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
acg|16 years ago
zzleeper|16 years ago
It's even worst if you are supposed to be leading by example, as cocoa is apple's own design.
crad|16 years ago
Confusion|16 years ago
CamperBob|16 years ago
There were many good points in the article, and that's only one of them. Thoughts on the others, particularly the 'openness' of H.264 or lack thereof?
binspace|16 years ago
mclin|16 years ago
I used to think Apple did this on purpose to spite windows users, but then I got a mac and discovered iTunes sucks on OSX too.
Damn you beach ball!
mr_justin|16 years ago
That being said, the last time I used iTunes on Windows it was about as enjoybable as waiting for a Java Applet to load up.
mattmaroon|16 years ago
I still can't believe Apple so thoroughly neglects 90% of their customers.
protomyth|16 years ago
I do wonder if the trend to use WebKit for a lot more things will continue.
archgrove|16 years ago
Their main point, that he's somehow a hypocrite because Apple haven't used the latest tech for everything, entirely misses the point he's making - Putting a 3rd party layer between your platform and developers can cause a lag in new features being used. He then states he's mostly worried that Adobe would have really amplified this lag, as "Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms". He doesn't say it's bad that they've been this slow, just that they are this slow. If it takes them 10 years to adopt Cocoa, why would anything in iPhone 4.0 turn up in Flash till 2015? His claim is that middleware lag is a bad thing is not weakened by iTunes for Windows being crappy - if anything, it's strengthened.
He makes his position very clear - "we sell more devices because we have the best apps", and feels they get the best apps without middleware. There's nothing inconsistent with this position, whilst still taking advantage of other platforms lack of restrictions. I'm not even going to deal with the authors claim that h.264 is as proprietary as Flash: A standard that was developed by a committee, in the open, with many implementations and a licensing scheme for anyone, versus a commercial closed product developed by a single company and no competitive implementations? Sure, there's no difference at all there.
nkassis|16 years ago
mattmiller|16 years ago
It is really weird, before this everyone hated flash. It was pretty well accepted as a necessary evil that we all wished we could do without (at least that is the vibe I got). We are now almost able to do without it, and 1 OS maker is trying to push that trend.
The truth is that flash kinda sucks, and it makes the OS look bad, and that is bad for Apple.
tomlin|16 years ago
schammy|16 years ago
Example - he basically says Adobe sucks because they just finally got around to releasing a full "Cocoa" binary for CS5. And yet Apple has the same problems. The Finder was Carbon until Snow Leopard was released, less than a year ago. And iTunes, arguably their biggest app, is still Carbon. Yet somehow because Adobe still had Carbon apps as of a few weeks ago, they are evil.
tlrobinson|16 years ago
I'm sure Apple would rather not have to release a Windows version of iTunes, but it's necessary to sell more iPods.
CoryMathews|16 years ago
S_A_P|16 years ago
They want to keep flash out of the mobile device space, so arguing about creating crappy desktop apps is a red herring.
digitallogic|16 years ago
jaimzob|16 years ago
mbreese|16 years ago
I miss the generally geeky articles on alternative operating systems, but ArsTechnica's open source coverage started to pick up about the time that I stopped reading OSNews that I had pretty much forgotten about it until today. Reading this article made me remember why I stopped going there.
schammy|16 years ago
Let me also guess - you own a Mac and an iPhone, and are mad because someone is saying bad things about your precious Apple. Correct?
jsz0|16 years ago
akkartik|16 years ago
aufreak3|16 years ago
... and though Apple's comments do mention Adobe taking its time to cocoa-ize its apps, this is clearly about the iPod Touches and iPhones and iPads.
Its sad, however, that in order to do this, Apple has forbidden the entire category of runtimes - including Scratch. Now Alan Kay might be the one going "Grrrrr..."!
aufreak3|16 years ago
youngnh|16 years ago
If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
with respect to "private api" arguments made here: http://www.marco.org/500743718
almakdad|16 years ago
navyrain|16 years ago
codingthewheel|16 years ago
stcredzero|16 years ago
hartard|16 years ago
That makes you a hypocrite too.
kqueue|16 years ago
aneth|16 years ago
CoryMathews|16 years ago
However I enjoy flash videos and flash games. I don't want someone telling me I can no longer play these games.
MichaelGG|16 years ago
tdfx|16 years ago
zmmmmm|16 years ago
schammy|16 years ago
Example - he basically says Adobe sucks because they just finally got around to releasing a full "Cocoa" binary for CS5. And yet Apple has the same problems. The Finder was Carbon until Snow Leopard was released, less than a year ago. And iTunes, arguably their biggest app, is still Carbon. Yet somehow because Adobe still had Carbon apps as of a few weeks ago, they are evil.
apphacker|16 years ago
hackermom|16 years ago
GrandMasterBirt|16 years ago
rafa8a|16 years ago