> I don’t see that as a false equivalency.

To me and perhaps others, those elements matter when making a comparison, so it seems we’ll disagree on how equivalent the examples are.

> Plus AOL IM, MSN and ICQ weren’t open either.

I was replying to the examples of Twitter and Reddit you gave.
AIM, MSN and ICQ weren’t amongst your examples, presumably because they’re not equivalent to Twitter and Reddit (open to third parties and then not anymore).

But I feel I’ve covered the initiatives “against” AIM, MSN and ICQ and why I think they’re not equivalent to Beeper extensively enough further down that comment.

> There’s been plenty of 3rd party clients for Twitter and Reddit that weren’t free. They were seen as the good guys when those apps broke after Twitter and Reddit decided they didn’t want 3rd party app support.

So now we’re going from one false equivalency to another?

Perhaps it helps if I break it down. The players on the board are:

A) Grassroots selfless non-profit initiatives vs. corporations, the former having the goal to enrich community as a whole instead of enriching themselves

B) Small for-profit indie developers + grassroots non-profit selfless initiatives which tried to help people with disabilities to participate in online discourse + well as researchers trying to contribute to general knowledge who all were paying a fee for API usage commensurate with market value and financial capabilities vs. corporations who in actuality wanted to kill third party API access but instead of outright saying that and doing so, instead decided to hike their prices to ridiculous astronomical levels in a surprise with not enough time to even digest the changes, all while making duplicitous comments throughout even going as far as reassuring developers right before, only to follow it up with derogatory comments and in one case defamation and utter disrespect to both the affected developers, the people with disabilities that got excluded and their everyday users l, and all but ensuring the death of both third party apps (if not outright bankrupting them) as well as grassroots projects for the benefit of the community as whole

C) A for-profit SaaS startup using fake credentials to receive authentication blobs, violating the CFAA’s computer trespass statutes by accessing another corporation’s servers unauthorized and facilitating unauthorized access by third parties with goal of selling the other corporation’s services for $2/mo

A) came about without any profit motives and in cases, like Pidgin, didn’t even involve reverse engineering[0], but were created with public documents and even help from people of the company they were trying to connect to[1]. Let alone spoofing credentials to circumvent authentication. They weren’t owed anything, but were being selfless

B) Has mostly to do with poorly treating paying customers, closing up something that was open, having benefitted from third parties’ work to grow, and even then the “normie” backlash only really gained traction after abysmal and unprofessional communication by the people in charge at Reddit and Twitter. They were owed something (at the very least decency) but didn’t get it, with a small portion being selfless.

C) Is mainly a company trying to make a buck, wrapping it in some moral stance and feeding it to the masses. They weren’t owed anything and acted wronged.

A, B and C are not comparable in the slightest. All three are wholly different scenarios.

> It’s not. My point was that Android, iOS and macOS are all built upon open source technologies. Yet things are more closed than ever. my point was just that it’s ironic.

I guess I misread what you were going for. I feel the opposite.
Granted I haven’t looked into this, and perhaps this is because repos are more readily accessible than ever, but I have the feeling there’s more open source stuff available than ever before.

So much so that 9/10 when I’m thinking of creating something because “it would be so darn handy to have” I check if someone beat me to it and often times this ends up being the case and there’s a GitHub repo available with a permissive license that does the very thing I was about to waste my time on.

> I saved this to the end because I do actually completely agree with you on this. At least they’ve done the right thing now and open sourced Beeper. But it should never have been a commercial product to begin with.

It seems we can at least agree on some things.
That said, I was mainly trying to explain why people on HN might not be fully on Beeper’s side.

Personally I thought it was a pretty cool little workaround they bought (pypush), but didn’t think it was smart of them to try and sell it.

As illogical it might sounds, if this was just a DIY thing for people to do themselves then I would’ve probably leaned more towards Apple being petty by trying to block it.
But by it being a company doing it and trying to profit off of it, I immediately skewed more against Beeper.

In particular because I saw the writing on the wall. Not only of Apple mitigating it, but the subsequent “woe is me” by Beeper as well.
Whereas I’m more of the mentality that if you’re gonna fuck around like this, at least take it on the chin if it doesn’t work out.

But that’s just me I guess.

0: https://web.archive.org/web/19990210175349/http://www.marko....

1: https://archive.ph/2012.12.08-193508/http://www.forbes.com/2...