So say I build a house. I furnish that house. I pay for the land under the house, the carpenters to build that house, the architects that designed it, the taxes and mortgage and all fees on that house. Its my house. I have the keys.
Now I invite you to come live in my house, maybe as a renter. I charge you a small fee. I tell you what part of the house you can move about freely and what parts are off limits. You sign that agreement....in tech talk, we call this a EULA usually. But just go with the simple house metaphor.
Now, as the landlord, I walk into the house one day, MY house, and you've broken into the parts of the house that were off limits to your use. Not only that, but you've turned my living room into YOUR living room, set up a dance pole and started up a strip club there. You freely invite all of your friends into MY house and claim "Hey, its MY STRIP CLUB" and then want me to somehow hire you as the general manager of this strip club you've set up in MY HOUSE because well hey...there are nude chicks dancing there and who doesn't want THAT in their living room? In fact you've got a whopping twelve other paying friends who want to see nude chicks in MY LIVING ROOM and I should be thanking you, no no no, I mean HIRING you for making MY LIVING ROOM into this better place.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up the mentality of the Cydia community. Its not their house. They didn't do anything creative or inventive. They took a great product with a cohesive design from other great minds and they hacked it to do things that weren't part of the product roadmap. Maybe sometimes, they created things that were part of future roadmap items and so brought them to light faster. And in doing so, maybe I'll even acknowledge that they 'expanded horizons' at Apple Labs. But Apple owns all the IP they designed on their OS. And you've turned it into the equivalent of a seedy, second-rate strip club because, again, a whole whopping TWELVE paying customers somehow know better and care more about the future of that product than Apple does, right? Did I mention the nekkid chicks? IN THE LIVING ROOM! WHAT A CONCEPT!
That makes Apple a responsible landlord and the Cydia 'developers' (more like disruptive hackers) just irresponsible geeks with no appreciation for intellectual property rights. Oh, ahem, until its THEIR HOUSE that gets trampled. As is evidenced by all the posts here and elsewhere that Cydia is somehow the 'savior of the iPhone' for all the 'great contributions' that have been made to the success of the platform. If anything, I'd argue Cydia and the Jailbreaking community have done more harm to the success of the of the iPhone than any single group on the planet. We could start with the whole 'free tethering!!!!111!!!!" apps as an end to unlimited data plans, or jump immediately to the 'liberating apps' like Installous if you prefer. But hey....every ecosystem has their share of farting apps. At least the farting apps are only obnoxious, not outright damaging to the brand.
The only Cydia developers worth spit are the ones that figured out how to play professionally and legally within the boundaries of Apples ecosystem. We call these men and women "App Store Developers."
