Saurik on 'Competition vs. Community'

Jay Freeman, the developer of Cydia, has posted a lengthy article explaining the background behind Cydia, his motivations to work on the project, and how he looks at competition. The post follows the announcement of the new iMods installer app.

So, some people are going to hate me for this post, and I've said some of this before, but I really want to express it in more detail. I've been wanting to write something like this for a long time, and recently I think I've been in a mindset where I need to think through some of these thoughts anyway, so "here goes nothing".

Suarik's post is an extensive one, addressing topics such as: Cydia as a Business, Community Efforts, Abnormal Motivation, My Involvement, Cydia as a Job, The Bitter Truths, Other's Opportunity, My Motivations, Money Does Not Motivate Me, Competition Does Not Motivate Me, Why Would I Bother?, The Cult of Competition, Picking Fights Loses People, Valuing Repositories, Earning Trust, Not Even Effective, and Competing with Cydia.


We suggest you read the entire post; however, below you can find suarik's closing remarks on 'Competing with Cydia':

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With all this background, we now can hopefully understand what my response is to competition: I am not "motivated", and in fact I tend to get stressed out and avoid the project in question; I instead work on other things that seem happier, and fall back on "obligation" and "pride" to keep the project maintained.

Maybe I'm just being egotistical here, but I think I add a lot of value to the jailbreak community: I am not "just a storefront". However, if you compete with me on the storefront, you not only indirectly affect my interest to keep working in the community, but you directly affect my ability to spend time doing so.

I always then feel like I have to ask people who see jailbreaking as an "opportunity to better monetize what that saurik chump won't": are you actually prepared to handle the situation where I get fed up and leave? Do you rely on my software? Are you relying indirectly on the people who in turn rely on me, or my friends?


Because if you are, you aren't just picking a fight, you are walking into one you can't win: where on the one side is losing quickly, and the other side is still losing, it's just losing a little bit later, after the infrastructure you are relying on crumbles and key parts of the developer and support community (first- and third- party) disappear.

You might think that all the things that I or SaurikIT contribute are "givens" you can rely on, and that I will maintain them even after you sap the fun of it and bleed away the funding; but I don't have to, won't want to, and wouldn't be able to afford to. Nor, to be clear, should anyone (user or developer) feel entitled to me doing so :(.
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