"it’s open - with the corrosive mentality that surrounds such openness."
That's must be why Oracle and IBM have never made money supporting their products on Linux - it's that corrosive mentality of having the core of the underlying kernel be open source.
"Existence of some viable open source models doesn’t change the reality for the vast majority of developers. We don’t have a rich daddy like Mozilla. We don’t have an operating system for which we can use a paid-support model. We just want to make apps, then sell enough copies of them so that we can make some more.
"The only principle that enters into it is that of survival: keeping food on the table, and making sure the lights stay on. Open doesn’t sit well with those goals."
The article seemed to be saying that since android is based on a FOSS kernel, and FOSS is a cancer (in Balmer's famous words) then people will pirate Android apps. Of course iOS is based on an essentially public domain BSD kernel where you are free to copy it all you want.
But you could read it to say, the Google app store is more open than Apple's restricted/approved walled garden and this allows more pirate apps. The article isn't very clearly written.
Of course the open access also avoids the many stories we get on here about - my original app was arbitrarily removed by someone at Apple because they thought it was the copy of another app - and I can't talk to anyone about it.
That's must be why Oracle and IBM have never made money supporting their products on Linux - it's that corrosive mentality of having the core of the underlying kernel be open source.