[1] What is your ultimate thesis/prescriptive with this piece? The first posting seems largely informative/descriptive, but then your follow up comment suggests that you are turning it into an opinion piece. Are you trying to say that Apple should stop persecuting jailbreakers? That Apple should be less controlling with the app store by (1) approving apps more freely and/or (2) taking a smaller cut of the revenues (note that Google also takes a 30% cut of all Android App store sales, though they claim that they are not making a profit by doing so)? That all apps should be free (because access to free proprietary apps is one huge reason why people jailbreak..)? Or that Apple should embrace the benefits of open source and switch to a fully iOS/app store (Given Apple's philosophy and business model of also profiting nicely from handsets I think this is a noble but losing argument...), but still allow app-developers to charge? Perhaps you could discuss Apple's fairly extensive history of using open source in OS X and Mac computers and support for different OSs on their computing hardware to propose a more hybrid-solution. I could be wrong, but I don't think there is the same level of backlash against OSX or mac laptops as being closed and patriarchal -- a lot of my hacker friends swear by their macbook pros and happy run ubuntu or other versions of linux on them.

[2] Some data on the number of jailbreakers, or % jail broken phones over total iPhones sold towards the beginning of the paper would help the reader understand the scope of the situation (perhaps you can find more updated statistics, I just did a quick data search). If only a small or stagnant % of people are still jailbreaking, would Apple be concerned enough to want to switch to a more open model? Have they pursued the issue since the statutory amendments, and if so via which avenues?

[3] I'm pretty sure that your example of the copy/paste app was also available in the legit app store (I think I had it!), so maybe you should talk about something they flat out don't allow, like tethering? Also, apple's integration of features previously available on jail broken apps does not necessarily indicate they "recognize the innovation and value that developers of free software" bring to the table, or that they have "greatly benefitted [sic]" from the jailbroken apps. Their product development cycle is long, and they are largely aware of which features are commonly requested or "the next step." It just takes them longer to integrate features into iOS because they are a large company with standards and a lot of inertia. Thus, I think that Apple's lag time in integrating these features speaks more to the speed of distribution, which as discussed in class is slower for closed systems. Ultimately, I think certain features are just better when they are fully built into the OS rather than existing as a separate app (I'm sure I wasn't the only one to ditch my copy/paste app as soon as Apple integrated it into the native OS). So could make an argument that if Apple fully opens iOS for development, people could integrate some of these improvements into the native OS more quickly.

[4] Alternatively, you could discuss the many wonderful open source initiatives (see cocoa controls, sparrow, and the libraries listed here for just a few examples) that have sprung up amongst iOS developer community as a way that iOS HAS benefited from open source, despite the general aversion to it coming from 1 Infinite Loop. Perhaps as part of a larger discussion of how a movement towards open source is really inevitable over time, and aligned with certain fundamental tendencies of human nature (is that getting needlessly abstract? haha). People don't like to reinvent the wheel. People like to collaborate. People like to be free to explore and understand the tools around them. Even Apple developers!

-- CrystalMao - 14 Oct 2011