Talk:Cydia/Archives/2012/November

serious misrepresentation of Cydia and Telesphoreo :(

Hello. I am the the developer behind both Cydia and Telesphoreo. Today, I looked at the Cydia article on Wikipedia, and it is frankly incredibly disconcerting: a specific author, named Brian Reading, has seemingly gone on a campaign to cause an overall confusion between these two projects, that actually goes so far as to cause me legal liability concerns (or so says my lawyers, with respect to the distribution contracts we have in place). I am therefore compelled to make certain that there is a public statement from me disavowing connection with the descriptions provided by this article, such that if someone where to "come at me" and claim that my tacit approval of this article's comments are true, that I have some basis to not be held accountable.

In specific, this article, with edits by a specific Brian Reading (someone I have no connection with, and therefore cannot be held accountable for the actions thereof), not only implies but explicitly states that a number of commercial and copyrighted projects, such as MyWi and Barrel, are "packages in Telesphoreo". This is quite evidently false from anyone that has used Cydia: MyWi was developed by "Intelliborn Corporation", and is distributed in an APT repository maintained, managed, and entirely controlled by a company called "ModMyi, LLC". These products have a sales and licensing agreement with SaurikIT for purposes of the Cydia Store: the product is not "in Telesphoreo", and there is otherwise no ownership, partnership, or encapsulation of these products.

I think it is therefore important to clarify how Cydia, and APT, actually work: APT is a package management tool, that accesses one of a number of "APT repositories" in order to download (and then install) content. These repositories can be operated by any of a number of entities, and there is no reason to believe that APT repositories that are accessible via any tool that claims to be compatible with APT (whether it actually links with libapt, as does Cydia, or claims to reimplement it, such as Icy) have any other relation with any other.

For a very clear example: Oracle Database XE is distributed via an APT repository at oss.oracle.com, which allows it to be easily installed on APT-based distributions such as Debian. Claiming that "Oracle Database XE" is "a package in Debian", however, would seem ludicrous, and would likely bring one of Oracle's lawyers down on the project due to a number of factors, from simple licensing incompatibility to copyright infringement due to lack of distribution terms to shear trademark endangerment and libel.

You might then ask where people obtain information about repositories. It here must be made very clear that Telesphoreo itself does not come with knowledge of the repository for ModMyi. At times in the past, Telesphoreo maintained a package that made it easier to install ModMyi's repository on your system (including its certificate for purposes of verifying the authenticity of the data that comes from it), but this was cleared up a long time ago... if anyone takes so much as a few minutes to glance through Telesphoreo's Subversion repository (where its source code and other build pieces is stored), they would find that there is no mention of ModMyi; and, while some other (very small) third party repositories have such packages, these have been clearly decreasing in number over time, and are not a default part of any tool that installs or bootstraps Telesphoreo.

Instead, the large default repositories that "come with Cydia" are part of Cydia's installation process (meaning that if you do not install Cydia on a distribution of Telesphoreo, you will never see them; of course, alternatives to Cydia may and often do install them as well), and in fact are only added to APT's configuration after Cydia is run (merely installing Cydia is not sufficient for these repositories to become registered); this configuration is maintained in its own file called "cydia.list" in APT's configuration, and attempts to edit that file through tools other than Cydia will be undone and overwritten by Cydia during the next execution of Cydia (as Cydia maintains its own list of APT repositories that it considers to be installed in an entirely-unrelated-to-APT mechanism stored in /var/lib/cydia).

Yet, this article (and specifically, a single author: Brian Reading) seems to claim that numerous commercial products, products which are distributed by third parties such as ModMyi and which are sold via the Cydia Store, for which limited licensing and sales agreements are in place only with SaurikIT for purposes of Cydia, are somehow part of an open-source project that I also run, one which is somewhat analogous to Debian, called Telesphoreo. This is not true, and it is therefore again why I must come here to make it very clear that Telesphoreo disavows any interest or connection in these products, and certainly to make it clear that Telesphoreo is not acting as an alternative distribution point for these products: these products are not "in Telesphoreo".

With this cleared, I would now like to point to some other glaring inaccuracies, that I believe will cause users serious confusion: for one, the version of APT "in Telesphoreo" is not "known as Telepshoreo", as Brian Reading explicitly claims in his latest edits to this article. To claim that much would be akin to claiming that the version of APT that comes with Debian is "known as Debian", which to a user of Debian (such as myself) would sound absurd: claiming that somehow the situation is different for Telesphoreo, with no source or evidence to the contrary (certainly not one from its maintainer: myself), would seem to be a misuse of Wikipedia.

It is also bothersome that, again Brian Reading, states that WinterBoard is "in Telesphoreo", although I can see why someone who does not use Cydia often might be confused. Due to some issues with the cost of making outbound requests, and matters with respect to URLs and bandwidth hosting, Telesphoreo's resulting binaries are distributed in an APT repository on "apt.saurik.com" that is shared with a few packages that are not in Telesphoreo. To be clear: this means that if a developer were to check out the source code to Telesphoreo and build it, you would not end up with a copy of WinterBoard in the result. However, WinterBoard is also available from the same repository on "apt.saurik.com", which is currently labeled "ios".

While you might think "this is not a serious problem and need not be corrected", it actually causes these projects harm with respect to contributors: Telesphoreo for a long time had a bug tracker, a wiki, and most clearly a repository of source code where users and developers can obtain the upstream code, patches, and build scripts used to construct the packages that are truly "in Telesphoreo". However, developers who check out that repository will /not/ then have a copy of the code for WinterBoard, which is developed out of entirely separate source code repositories, and for which coordination of development (from discussions of bugs to new features) occurs entirely on IRC: these projects are simply not related.

In Cydia, for anyone who does not use Cydia enough for these distinctions to be evident, the way this attempts to be made clear is that the repository operating at "apt.saurik.com" claims to be "Cydia/Telesphoreo", and is hosted by SaurikIT as a service to both Cydia and Telesphoreo. Now, while some may claim "if they are hosted at the same place, they are the same thing: WinterBoard is 'in Telesphoreo'", this ignores not only the high-level concerns and discussion listed above (regarding the clearly separate project organization for these two projects), but also ignores how the technology itself works. Some third party "repository aggregators", alternatives to Cydia (in specific, Rock Your Phone), and in fact Cydia itself in the near future, have provided "meta-repositories" where users can make a single outgoing connection but get the APT metadata for multiple repositories at once: the existence of these services does not make these entities related.

Finally, I would like to point out one more confusing addition that was brought to this article recently (unfortunately, also by Brian Reading): attempting to connect Telesphoreo with MobileSubstrate, or its "extensions" that users may choose to install on their jailbroken devices. In this case, it is often the case that developers install packages on their devices, devices that /do not have Telesphoreo on them/, that use MobileSubstrate and extend other applications. While not a common complaint, some simply see Telesphoreo as "too large / complex", and have re-compiled their own versions of dpkg; some have even gone so far as to re-implement APT. As the various APT repositories using Cydia extensions are downwards compatible with other APT clients, users can then install many/most of the software available in the ecosystem without ever installing a single package from Telesphoreo.

So, I guess "in conclusion", I hope I have cleared up a few of the current issues with this article, as well as providing direction with where it can be taken to in the future in order to provide a more accurate understanding to the people who read this article. I understand that many people, for better or for worse, attempt to use Wikipedia as their "knowledge arbiter", relying on the people who edit it to provide a high-quality experience combining accurate information with simple-to-understand descriptions, and it is therefore very disappointing to me that this article now contains sufficiently confusing and dangerous misinformation in it that I am being forced, from a legal-advice standpoint, to now formally and publicly disavow its accuracy. :(

Jay Freeman (saurik) (talk) 20:16, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

I realize that this is in response to something from nearly a year ago, however I have just now come across it, and since it specifically names me several times, I feel that it is my duty to respond to it. I have not "gone on a campaign to cause an overall confusion" between Telesphoreo and Cydia. On the contrary, I have done my best to give clear information to readers about what these concepts are as I have done on many other Wikipedia articles. After all, that is the main purpose of an encyclopedia.

I encourage anyone reading Freeman's comments from above to give some of Wikipedia's guidelines a read. Please assume good faith and refrain from personal attacks. Also, I do assume that if there was some legal liability that I was causing, I would have been contacted in some way.

I am glad that the developer of Cydia has taken the time to attempt to clear up some misconceptions, however some of what has been written above is simply not true. I have, on numerous occassions, been the only editor here who has actively tried to write about what Cydia actually is. Cydia is a graphical front-end to APT.

I think what would've been much more helpful to us editors would be for a simple definition of the terms in question as I have done above. To clear up anything else, can you clearly and concisely define Telesphoreo using the same method? For example, "Telesphoreo is _________." Thanks. Brian Reading (talk) 18:15, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

"Telesphoreo is a distribution of ported Unix packages for Darwin/ARM." I say that first to get it out of the way. However, the first thing that really should be pointed out is that while you claim that "some of what has been written above is simply not true", you do not provide any specific example other than your insistence that "Cydia is a graphical front-end to APT", despite the fact that my clarifications about this article did not once even mention, much less complain about, that characterization: all complaints were directed at the separation between Telesphoreo (a set of Unix packages whose original purpose was to replace an AppTapp package that users used to call "BSD Subsystem"; for a couple months I think Telesphoreo was called "GNU Subsystem", but that was implying something incorrect, so I came up with new branding), Cydia itself, and the third-party packages hosted on third-party repositories that have little to no affiliation with either Telesphoreo or SaurikIT.

Now, that said, as you insist upon bringing it up and stating as such, I will point out that there are multiple aspects of Cydia: "Cydia Installer is a graphical front-end to a superset of APT that integrates with a payment service called the Cydia Store that has a backend statistics and management service called Cydia Connect; this infrastructure, encompassing all of the aforementioned items, is primarily used for the distribution of extensions developed for a framework called Cydia Substrate (often called MobileSubstrate in many community contexts for various historical reasons), as well as supporting content to go along with those extensions (a key example being themes for WinterBoard)". When people then refer to "Cydia" (without any specific qualification about which specific aspect of Cydia they are attempting to discuss) they are really talking about some messy subset of all of the above items.

Once you have that context, you begin to understand what people mean when they say (as I found it informative, I am providing the # of hits on Google for each) things like "cydia tweak" (1250k hits: an extension developed for Cydia Substrate), "cydia source/repository" (897k hits: an APT repository that provides the extra files and support fields that only Cydia accepts, such as Depiction; there seems to be a subtle distinction where people use "repository" to indicate something lower-level, but in practice they heavily overlapped), or "cydia store package/product" (46k hits: a package which can be purchased using our payment system). Again, however, I had not actually even once touched on or complained about this limiting definition of "Cydia" in my original statement: it is thereby not really relevant that you were the only editor who felt the need to portray Cydia as equivalent to a subset of Cydia Installer.

Interestingly (I say, as this is something a lot of people who are not part of our community yet attempt to write about it seem to not understand, leading me to have to give talks such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D91jVZ4Z6og), despite your statement that the things distributed in Cydia are "applications" which "are simply Cocoa Touch + Objective-C applications", the community largely looks down on "applications" (as an example: if you attempt to sell one via the Cydia Store, you may very well be rejected, and will go under serious scrutiny to determine why you wanted to list such a thing) as they could be distributed in the App Store (something we are attempting to not be): instead, the vast majority (to the point of almost entirely dominating) of the things you will find while browsing through the packages available on these repositories are extensions for Cydia Substrate (or themes designed to be used with such an extension; honestly, there are many more themes than extensions, but that is to be expected).

Finally, I will respond to your few final issues regarding my response (ones which are more about the response than about the content of the response). I did not attempt to provide any motive, positive or negative, for your actions related to this article: I only stated that you did them (which I maintain is true). The closest I came is to say you had "gone on a campaign to cause an overall confusion". Frankly, you did; however, you might very well feel that that was a correct and defendable action: if these really were the same thing, and you felt that people needed to know that, then that is exactly what you would do: go on a campaign to cause a confusion between them. That said, I will, however, go ahead and apologize for using the word "confusion", as maybe that is making my statement seem to fall on the wrong side of the "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" angle; I do, though, stand by "campaign".

As for "I do assume that if there was some legal liability that I was causing, I would have been contacted in some way", that would only be true if you were liable: I did not once state that you were liable, only that the article as it stood was in danger of making me liable. You can say anything you want on this website (with the possible exception of "libel", which itself involves an aspect of intent that I would never be able to prove even if I actually thought you were intending to commit the act, which again I never stated nor believed). You thereby would not and should not expect to have been "contacted in some way": the important thing was to clarify to potential readers (reporters, lawyers, etc.) what the real situation was and to expressly disavow any affiliation or control over these statements (as arguably I do, but I don't: I would not want someone claiming to a judge "Freeman could have removed these comments at any time, but chose to not do so: he is thereby complicit in their existence, and under the terms of our contract with him this is a clear violation"), preferably in the context they were being stated (as in, elsewhere-but-nearby on this website).

However, that does not change the situation that I really have only the most tenuous of distribution arrangements with some of the products (such as MyWi and Barrel, to provide specific examples) that this website, under your explicit direction (as part of your edit of 15:35, 17 November 2011), expressly claimed were "packages in Telesphoreo"; again: despite not being covered by the charter of Telesphoreo, nor being hosted in Telesphoreo's repository, nor being managed by the websites and infrastructure of Telesphoreo, nor mentioning Telesphoreo, nor being mentioned by Telesphoreo, nor saying "in Telesphoreo" when browsing Cydia, nor... well, I could probably do this forever, so I will stop now ;P. Suffice it to say: Barrel is at best a "package in BigBoss" (MyWi then being "in ModMyi"), a repository you happen to be able to browse using Cydia (or Icy, or Rock), but is certainly not "in Telesphoreo" (to repeat: any more than Oracle is "in Debian" just because it is hosted in an APT repository). Jay Freeman (saurik) (talk) 23:37, 14 November 2012 (UTC)