I'm not sure what you think is inane - I wouldn't mind hearing. And I read the post as anti-Appstore more than anti-Apple. (I think it's an important distinction in context.)
The poster is responding to this in the thread above him:
How many useful applications are in Debian's repositories?
<snip>
10 thousand? 20 thousand?
How long has Debian been around? 17 years?
Now compare this to iPhone: 3 years and ~140,000 applications.
The post isn't criticizing Apple so much as saying to that argument, "You're not counting parallel things here. The Appstore is filled with trivially small apps - apps that amount to no more than a simple webpage. That inflates those numbers."
Funny you should mention the original post, because he makes a very good yet obvious point:
> If 'Free Software' is to succeed as 'Free software' it needs to produce superior product and out compete
It was wrong of him to trot out total app count, because it's a meaningless number, but there's no question that the iPhone has attracted a huge amount of developer interest. This has resulted in a large library of very well-designed and compelling software across all categories, and has allowed independent developers to reach more users than they ever could have dreamed.
Much of this developer traction can be attributed to Apple's management of the App Store, but this kind of exciting software development was happening before the App Store, when developers did it just for fun and had to reverse-engineer the APIs. If you weren't there in 2007, you have no idea how exciting it was.
It says a lot about what can happen when you deliver a compelling piece of hardware running a sophisticated platform. Of course, the reply addressed none of it, and succeeds only in demonstrating a complete lack of understanding about consumer software development in 2010.
Thanks for the extended response. I don't believe that Debian (as the Free Software under discussion here) is in any relevant sense competing with iOS (or OSX, for that matter).
Debian's mission is to provide a universal (as much hardware as possible) operating system freely (free as in beer, free as in freedom). This simply doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that's competing with iOS in any relevant sense.
So, I don't think the author fails to address that point. I think it's irrelevant.
