Last week, news broke out that JailbreakMe creator Comex was working with iMods on developing a Cydia Substrate alternative. Comex mentioned that him working on a Cydia Substrate alternative will cause a lot of drama in the jailbreak community, and it has. Creator of Cydia, Saurik aka Jay Freeman, responded to this whole situation in an article on his personal blog.
In the article, Saurik talks about why open source isn’t always the best, how Comex coming back affects him and some new changes coming to Cydia. He writes that all these arguments with Comex and comments about iMods on Reddit and IRC is taking a toll on him mentally. Whereas Comex wants an open source software, Saurik believes that closed source is the way to go. When iMods asked for Sauriks help, he politely declined. Comex on the other hand, is now developing a Cydia Substrate alternative called Substitute, which when completed will empower iMods to be a Cydia replacement.
The awkward-to-me result is that we now see comex—someone who talks a lot about open systems—building tools for people who are specifically against the idea of open platforms: who talk a lot about commercialization, strong DRM to defeat piracy, and how allowing third-party repositories outside the centralized, curated experience would fundamentally undermine what they consider required to build a clean experience. comex is now working for the very ideas I thought we wanted to defeat.
The key thing I think I’m going to do is “retract” somewhat: while you are probably all quite used to me being active on places like /r/jailbreak, having to deal with the escalating comments from a few posters there about iMods (especially some of the recent stuff, largely due to coolstar’s Anemone, a monolithic replacement for the WinterBoard ecosystem, also due to iMods) really took a toll on me, and the return of comex is much more than I can mentally handle.
Amidst all this, Saurik also gave us some news about what to expect from Cydia in the near future. There’s going to be some visual changes to the Cydia home, a new payment system and updated Substrate. To really understand what Saurik has to say about Comex working for the other side, you’ll have to read the entire article. It’s worth it, if you’re interested that is. This could be bad for the jailbreak community, as the last time Saurik and Comex were arguing, Saurik almost quit.
He states that he is going to withdraw and lay back, stop being active on public threads as he doesn’t want to fight anymore.
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