I came to know of C4 after finding online videos from some of the talks there in 2007. Living in an — almost bankrupt financially, intellectually and creatively — land, the C4 videos brought a glitter of hope; like Google Video lectures, Microsoft’s MURL (now ResearchChannel), C4 presented a community, a world so rare in Hellas; interesting people, knowledgeable people, smart people working with fascinating technology, talking about their work and actually having interesting things to say. This was no ‘ordinary’ commercial conference; not an academic exercise in intellectual masturbation. It was hands-on, to the point and pleasant.
The next year we were starting AthensBook and Geo|Ads and I looked for videos of that year’s C4 (C4[2]), but they were nowhere to be found. Yet C4 continued and I had almost forgotten about it until earlier today when my customary visit to my feed reader informed me that C4 was no more; the reason: Apple’s continued world-domination-driven policy of restricting developer freedom, enforcing its own terms down their customers’ throats, but more importantly how the latter effectively accept it.
And while I — too — am concerned about the direction Apple has taken in the past few years (especially when contrasted with their policy, image and general position a decade ago, when they were weak and trying to restore their financial condition and technical standing in the market), I am not quite certain that discontinuing C4 is really helpful for the Mac, iPhone or wider software development community, or that it will have any significant impact in Apple’s decision making in the future.
