I read your comment, then I read the page.

I disagree on every single line.

This is not about software. Having the software on its own won't help you.

If in 2006, the year before the iPhone came out, you had the software as FOSS, would that help? There was no hardware yet. There was nothing even with a capacitative touch screen with multitouch yet. The whole point of the design was to do away with styli, but all extant touchscreen devices needed styli back then.

I was implementing corporate networks in 1991. I built them with NetBEUI for PC-to-PC comms, and IPX/SPX or DECnet for talking to servers. Occasionally all 3.

If I gave 1991 me the source of timbl's WorldWideWeb, it would be no use. I didn't have NeXTstep. My corporate workstation ran X11 and talked to servers over it but it didn't run TCP/IP. I had no TCP/IP in the building.

The point of the Web is the protocol, having clients and servers. Having docs is much more use than having code. Code is useless fragile stuff.

Android reproduces a lot of the interaction model of the iPhone but it came from seeing iPhones and trying iPhones. It did not come from getting source. Nobody ever got the source.

Forget the source. Source code doesn't matter. It's an irrelevant distraction.

Source code is not the big deal here. Inventing a new way to interact with computers is the big deal here. Getting at the software does not matter.

So if I want to do this I have to invent everything from scratch like he did?

You have to create a space and find collaborators and build it together from scratch, yes.

Code is not the invention, it is merely the implementation of the invention.

If you think it is the code then you're missing the point. It is the idea.

If you want to implement it, then maybe you have to study this implementation, study with the implementors, and understand what it is and what it does and how it does it, and stop obsessing over some ASCII files that encode a little bit of the logic.

Life is sometimes a jigsaw puzzle. It is the picture that really matters. Having a map of the shape of all the pieces, with no images, would not really help you. It might after an epic amount of work help you reassemble a square of cardboard but that is not the picture.

It seems to me less that they are a "dodge" and more that the two of you have philosophical disagreements.

If have taken the time to understand what he means when he says "Realtalk is not made of source code", and disagree with his conclusions, that's not quite the same as him being dishonest.