Where is the hacker spirit here? The number of Apple apologists that have crawled out to say "see? I told you so!!" is saddening. It is a bit dicey when you're charging for it, but since Mini was entirely client-side it would be feasible for a free version to exist. Apple claims iMessage is E2EE, do we have proof they aren't siphoning the messages from the client once it's been decrypted? The level of trust we have t…
> Where is the hacker spirit here? I'm torn on this. Is it following the hacker spirit to get more people plugged into Apple's closed ecosystem? Maybe? Maybe not? Reverse engineering a proprietary protocol is certainly hacker-y. But building a business around that -- essentially charging people to put more load onto someone else's infrastructure, who have to bear the costs (even a rich behemoth like Apple) -- I'm not…
Yes — it's adversarial interoperability, and that is always a good thing because it breaks lock-ins. Though mostly irrelevant to this particular case, adversarial interoperability also forces the service owner to compete with third-party clients which always put the user first; it removes the service owner's of control over the UX and presentation.
I don't know about AIM, but ICQ also used OSCAR protocol. The official ICQ clients were bloated, shitty and full of ads. Not many people used them. Most people used QIP, Miranda, Pidgin, Adium, Jimm, or even NatICQ. No one cared about how ICQ's owner would make money — and, really, no one should care about that, it's their own problem. Maybe if they made a client that's better than third-party offerings, then people would switch to it. But they never did.