Rogue Amoeba responds to Phil Schiller

If anything, I think it's truly sad that, given all the great things Apple has made, their legacy seems to be that closed and proprietary is better. It's the IT equivalent of "greed is good".

iOS would be just as integrated and nice if Apple released it as Open Source. But it would give people more choice, Apple would make make less money from it, and they would then be at a disadvantage compared to other companies that did control their entire ecosystem.

The problem is that closed, proprietary systems tend to create monopolies, and while the initial products may be great, monopolies are seldom good for customers.

The other mistake people make is thinking that closed or open is an either-or proposition. Apples nice iOS ecosystem wouldn't be destroyed overnight if they had a settings option marked "allow unsigned third party apps". Would that compromise their long term / whole stack vision? No.

would this guy be ok if someone 'reverse engineered' his email password. Every product wants to protect its IP in some sense...google won't like if someone reverse engineered their search ranking, apple won't obviously like if someone hacked the iphone to run android, intel won't like if someone was able to reverse engineer the chip design and then sell it for a tenth of the cost..heck would these guys like if I was able to hack their app and bypass the license check?

Certain internal software API's are as much intellectual property as is the physical hardware design.

Sadly, that's not the way it's being marketed to the masses of developers. You're talking about what seems to be a technical detail to someone who's been corporate-brainwashed by the apple reality distortion field (maybe they're keeping Jobs in stasis in order not to lose it?). Then, SURPRISE!!! it's not such a technical detail after all, apple has tricked you so! It's like a surprise birthday party, except your gift is a burning bag of dog poo.

Typical corporate trickery. The reason a lot of people fall for it is because they have an open mind (definitely advocated by Apple) and therefore are gullible (definitely wanted by AAPL).

Having written something somewhere doesn't make you less of an asshole for handling in a dirty, asocial way.

> A key is not an API.

I never said that.

> AirPlay is not an API.

AirPlay is a remote interface allowing a local application to control software on a remote device and stream data to it. I could implement it over HTTP as a RESTful API or whatever way I see fit and however simple and thin it would be†, it is still a way for applications to programmatically interact through an interface, hence, an API.

But again, this is not a problem since we can now safely implement interfaces without fear.

> Rogue Amoeba's blog post picks apart these inaccuracies like shooting fish in a barrel

... and (assuming that one thinks they scored) misses the elephant in the room. encrypted AirPlay audio streams. Rogue Amoeba knows about this. Apple knows about this. The only party concealing that fact is Rogue Amoeba, and they're entirely disingenuous about it. Since the very first developments (and really, since their announcement of the feature upon release) people have been wondering about the inclusion of the Apple private key; yet Rogue Amoeba stayed quiet on the subject. What I expected of them was at some point to directly answer the question "did we use the Apple private key?" with "yes" or "no".

Again, whether I put a license or not to use my PGP private key, no one has the right to pick up content encrypted for me. They basically created an eavesdropping piece of code.

And this is true for any licensing scheme. If there's no license satisfying my will, I have no right to take it anyway. Rogue Amoeba even goes to admit:

> While Apple licenses the ability for hardware manufacturers to play AirPlay audio, there is no such licensing program for software. When we inquired as to the possibility of this type of licensing being available for software manufacturers in the future, we were informed that it was unlikely.

Then they decided that since there's no license covering that case, they have the rights to build something respecting the AirPlay API (they do) and decrypt data with a stolen private key (they don't). And went on to build it and sell it, get kicked out, complain (rightfully so regarding opacity, laconic answers, and delays), and ignore the most critical part in all subsequent communications. How cool is that?

Now the fact that Apple has no explicit licensing scheme for software manufacturers is a blind spot of their part, but who honestly believes that hardware manufacturers implement their AirPlay receiving devices as pure hardware? I bet the licensing terms could apply just as well to pure software endpoints.

> Whether or not Apple was right to do this independent of the fact that they were wrong to discredit Rogue Amoeba in an inaccurate way.

And the same applies to Rogue Amoeba.

† AirTunes has a HTTP control channel used to negotiate details, AES key exchange via RSA encryption, a remote volume knob, metadata transmission, progress information, and a data channel for audio streaming that can be suspended without closing the stream. http://git.zx2c4.com/Airtunes2/about/