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Bending the truth or outright lying to your own customers in order to deflect blame for a decision that you made arbitrarily is entirely another.This entire sentence applies to Rogue Amoeba. The Airplay protocol has been reverse engineered years ago: it's basically RTSP with an encrypted stream. Creating an AirPlay audio receiver is currently subject to a license, and requires a private key. This key has been extracted from a dumped AirPort Express ROM. Rogue Amoeba can say what they want about reimplementing the whole AirPlay protocol on their own, the clef-de-voûte is this private key, only available through licensing. When Schiller mentions private APIs, I believe he is not talking about an iPhone private API (which I'm positively sure Rogue Amoeba took great care of not using) but the remote AirPlay API, which they have no right to use without licensing.
The key point here is that there's a key virtually locking the API. I think it's perfectly apt to say now that — thanks to the Google/Oracle case — implementing an API is licit, but you would subsequently have to use your own public/private keys. Yet existing AirPlay sources encrypt the stream with Apple's public key, hence the content is at the sole destination of Apple's private key.
Compare this to the following situation: you publish you PGP public key and someone writes you an email and encrypts it with your public key. If someone steals your private key, that does not entitle him to decrypt and read the message whose sole intended recipient is you. This is, I believe, the crux of Apple's AirPlay licensing.
I generally don't like Apple's silent hammer, and I really like Rogue Amoeba and their software (which I bought multiple times), but — since I knew what was in play technically — when reading the last status report of Rogue Amoeba, it was obvious to me that they were concealing information with the goal of bending the truth to support their side of the argument.
This entire sentence applies to Rogue Amoeba. The Airplay protocol has been reverse engineered years ago: it's basically RTSP with an encrypted stream. Creating an AirPlay audio receiver is currently subject to a license, and requires a private key. This key has been extracted from a dumped AirPort Express ROM. Rogue Amoeba can say what they want about reimplementing the whole AirPlay protocol on their own, the clef-de-voûte is this private key, only available through licensing. When Schiller mentions private APIs, I believe he is not talking about an iPhone private API (which I'm positively sure Rogue Amoeba took great care of not using) but the remote AirPlay API, which they have no right to use without licensing.
The key point here is that there's a key virtually locking the API. I think it's perfectly apt to say now that — thanks to the Google/Oracle case — implementing an API is licit, but you would subsequently have to use your own public/private keys. Yet existing AirPlay sources encrypt the stream with Apple's public key, hence the content is at the sole destination of Apple's private key.
Compare this to the following situation: you publish you PGP public key and someone writes you an email and encrypts it with your public key. If someone steals your private key, that does not entitle him to decrypt and read the message whose sole intended recipient is you. This is, I believe, the crux of Apple's AirPlay licensing.
I generally don't like Apple's silent hammer, and I really like Rogue Amoeba and their software (which I bought multiple times), but — since I knew what was in play technically — when reading the last status report of Rogue Amoeba, it was obvious to me that they were concealing information with the goal of bending the truth to support their side of the argument.