Mike Lee is a product engineer in the Netherlands.
Follow @bmf on Twitter. If you have comments, email bmf@le.mu.rs.
For more information about Appsterdam, check out http://appsterdam.rs and follow @appsterdamrs.
Now for the entry you’ve all been waiting for: a quick guide on how to emigrate to Appsterdam.
Most non-European passport holders can be in Europe for 3 out of every 6 months, which includes the Netherlands. In other words, unless you have been kicking around Europe recently, you can come to Appsterdam for the summer without needing a Visa.
If you want to be here for longer than that, you will need a residence permit and the related work permit. For most people, that works as you would expect: you get a job offer here, and the employer takes care of the paperwork. While not normally a speedy process, there is a fast track for knowledge migrants, which we certainly are.
If you are a self-employed person, there is a point system the government uses to asses your ability to support yourself. While I don’t have any specific information on that, I wouldn’t be too afraid of this process, as we are, as a general statement, a desirable group.
Certain countries have other agreements with the Netherlands. For example, citizens of Canada, Australia and New Zealand under the age of 30 qualify for a 12-month “working vacation” visa.
For self-employed Americans, there is the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, which is a piece of war-era diplomacy that makes it relatively simple for Americans to set up manufacturing companies in the Netherlands. Since apps are, by definition, products, we certainly qualify for that.
If you want to stay here on the DAFT, plan on the process costing you €10.000. Half of that will be your Dutch company’s capital investment—basically money sitting in the bank you can’t touch—and half will be for legal fees, preparing a DAFT-friendly business plan, etc.
The attorney Chris Barth is the local specialist, and has a lot of specific information on his site. He is a native Philadelphian who has been in the Netherlands for over a decade, and is your absolute best bet for getting over here with minimal fuss.
Some additions to the information on his site:
You will need to order a new certified copy of your birth certificate to register as a resident alien.
You will need a secondary certification from the issuing state, called an apostille, for each birth certificate.
Health insurance is listed as a requirement, and is obtained easily here for around €100 a month.
For now, my advice is to come for the summer and if, about a month in, you decide you want to stay, you can get together with Chris to file the paperwork.
What about your spouse, kids, and pets? As far as I know, all immigration routes, including the DAFT, include residence permits, but not work permits, for your family. Your spouse can apply for their own work permit, or become a business partner in your DAFT company.
You may bring pets into the Netherlands only if they are not meant to be traded or sold. If you wish to bring your dog or cat when you are moving to the Netherlands, it needs a pet passport. Your pet must be examined by a recognized vet in the country you are moving from in order to obtain such a passport. The passport contains the following information: – a statement from the vet (in Dutch, English, French or German) that your pet has been vaccinated with an approved vaccine against rabies; – the date of vaccination; – your pet’s description including its breed, sex, age, colour and type of fur and its marks; – the name of the owner.
Important! Your dog or cat must have been vaccinated within 1 year and at least 30 days before your move. Please take into account that applying for such a passport will take some time. You should, therefore, apply for it at your vet no later than 10 days before your move. If you do not have a pet passport, your dog or cat will be vaccinated upon entering the country after which it will have to remain in quarantine for 30 days.
For a few other animals you need a health certificate. This is, at least, applicable to birds, horses, cows (and other ungulates), ferrets, minks and foxes. You can obtain this health certificate from a recognized vet in the country you are moving from. You do not need a health certificate or passport for other animals, for example, rabbits, hares and fishes. You can bring these animals without having to make special provisions.
One of the best things about being an expat in the Netherlands is that so many people are already doing just that, so there is a lot of information available everywhere. Perhaps the best source is the book “The Holland Handbook,” which is full of practical information for making the move.
(For some reason, Amazon is only taking pre-orders for the upcoming revision, but I’m sure you can find the current edition somewhere.)
My #unlodsys bug was closed as a duplicate. What does that mean?
Right now #unlodsys bugs are being closed as duplicates almost as soon as they are created. Although the response you get is pre-formed, rest assured that a real person sent it. It doesn’t take long to spot another in a series of duplicates, and the fact the bugs are being closed so soon means someone has noticed the trend.
From this we can extrapolate the bug is blinking red in Radar (Apple’s bug tracker) right now. That’s exactly what we want. The more times a bug is duplicated, the more powerful it becomes, because it shows the will of the people. This campaign is the same as calling your representative in government. The contents of the individual call is not as important as the number of calls they have received about the issue.
Aren’t we wasting the time of some poor engineer?
Absolutely not. Bug reports are not scrubbed (i.e., handled) by engineers, they are scrubbed by specialists. Only then are they forwarded to the appropriate people. We are not taking them away from their usual duties. Scrubbing these bugs is their job.
Bombarding these folks with duplicate bug reports is not an abuse of the system, it is exactly how the system is designed to work. Apple wants us to communicate with them via Radar. Doing it this way is, in a word, respectful, whereas flooding the email box of some poor evangelist or Steve Jobs himself would not be.
What do engineering bug reports have to do with legal?
It is a misconception that Radar belongs to engineering. Radar and its kin are used throughout the company for tracking all sorts of issues. Moreover, big events in Radar trigger a response beyond Radar. You can bet that when Radar blows up with something, Steve knows about it pretty quickly.
There’s also the very simple fact that our making a coordinated effort makes our grievances known all over the internet. The press have already noticed the #unlodsys boycott and reported on it, which increases the pressure on Apple.
Aren’t boycotts a waste of time?
Often, yes, because the number of people participating in the boycott is tiny compared to the total number of customers. In this case, however, there really aren’t that many productive developers. Action by a few hundred people means nothing relative to, say, the customer base of Proctor and Gamble, but in terms of the developer base of Apple, it has a huge impact.
Isn’t the Lodsys patent patently absurd?
It looks that way, but even absurd, easily invalidated patents cost more to defend against than most developers can afford. That’s the whole point of #unlodsys. We can’t even afford to have this conversation, so we’d like someone else who can, and who has skin in the game, to jump in.
What about other claims from Lodsys and other patent trolls?
There is a lot going on in the realm of patent trolling lately, and a lot more to come if we don’t act in a loud and coordinated fashion to stop it. Like good engineers, we have to focus our efforts on one API on one platform with one parasite. We picked the one that is a clear-cut case for Apple’s intervention and that actually impacts their revenue.
Isn’t this unjustified panic?
Regardless of whether it is justified, panic is useless. We need to funnel whatever feelings we have into action. Filing bugs and not using an API that could get us sued is a pretty reasonable course of action. We’re not filing a class action lawsuit or picketing 1 Infinite Loop. We’re just letting Apple, and those who watch Apple, know what we need and why.
Won’t Apple fix this anyway?
Maybe, and maybe our boycott will have no effect whatsoever. On the other hand, we might make them move faster, or with more severity. Moreover the online conversation this has generated will make its way into Apple. It might educate them. It might move them. It might even make them help us. The one thing we can be sure of is that the most effective way to have no effect is to do nothing.
What if Apple doesn’t respond?
Then that will be a wonderful opportunity for Google.
While the in-app purchase API boycott and bugroast get rolling under the hashtag #unlodsys, the next big question is what, exactly, do we want from Apple?
The short answer is, we want the same thing Jules wanted from Marcellus Wallace during the Wolf scene in Pulp Fiction.
1. We want immediate reassurance.
An open letter to our developers:
Chill out. We’re on it.
—SJ
2. We want Apple to destroy Lodsys by any means necessary.
Nothing keeps copycats at bay like heads mounted on pikes.
3. We want Apple to make us glad we work on their platform.
Platform providers should treat patent trolls who prey on their developers the way America treats terrorists who prey on her citizens.
If I could offer Apple a bit of advice learned from the airline industry, you should have a patent attorney on the doorstep of every developer affected by Lodsys and other patent trolls. It would be a relatively cheap way to set yourself apart from the other providers, who would love to entice your developers.
Yesterday I proposed an ecosystem-wide boycott on the use of Apple’s in-app purchase API in response to the ongoing Lodsys problem. This has generated a lot of feedback that I’d like to address.
If you currently have an app on the App Store that uses in-app purchase, you don’t have a choice. While removing in-app purchase from your app may not protect you from lawsuits, leaving it in at this point is tantamount to asking to be sued.
It’s like file sharing. When you hear people are getting sued, you stop doing it. You might still get sued, but if you continue file sharing your odds get worse every day. Stopping the risky behavior is simply the only thing that makes sense.
Aside from a logical act of self-protection, we are not cutting out in-app purchase to defeat Lodsys. We are cutting out in-app purchase to send a message to Apple that they need to get into this fight, or we are not going to be able to keep powering their revenue engine.
How should you handle this in your app? At this point, it seems advisable to continue to support restoring in-app purchases, but attempting to purchase new content should pull up an alert that says something like:
We are unable to support in-app purchase at this time due to the threat of lawsuit. more information
Regardless of whether you need to update your app to remove the offending API, or would simply like to let Apple know that this will have a chilling effect on your ability to continue working on their platform, you should file a bug. This will duplicate bug #9459079, the body of which follows:
Summary:
Use of the system-provided In-App Purchase API opens developers to patent infringement lawsuits from patent troll Lodsys, who are demanding licensing fees above and beyond Apple’s 30% cut.
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Ship an app that uses the In-App Purchase API
2. Wait to be contacted by Lodsys
3a. Pay Lodsys, and every patent troll that inevitably follows them
3b. Be sued out of existence
Expected Results:
Apple steps in using their nearly infinite financial and legal resources to protect their developer ecosystem, removing the threat of Lodsys, and ultimately pushing for reform of our broken patent system.
Actual Results:
Apple remains quiet, while their developer community privately and publicly freaks out.
Regression:
Dozens of developers, including James Thomson and Apple Design Award winner Iconfactory, have already been targeted by Lodsys.
Now that we are all up to speed on this whole Lodsys situation, what do we do? The reality is, there is nothing we as indie developers can do.
If we pay, we are collaborators in our own demise, as the precedent this sets will open a floodgate of parasites extorting licensing fees for their alleged patents, knowing we are too weak and too scared to do anything but pay.
If we don’t pay, we’ll still be out of business, just quicker, as we are sued out of existence.
Apple, on the other hand, has infinite money, skilled legal council, and skin in the game. They have benefited mightily from their developer ecosystem, and the approach of Lodsys and their ilk should trigger the same response farmers have when they find parasites on their cash crop.
I have every faith that Apple will ultimately stand up and fix this. We can’t assume they will do this out of altruism. There’s just no other response that makes sense for them from a business standpoint. Unfortunately for us, they also have infinite time, and are typically conservative in their response.
For the real people fighting this new war, like James Thomson and Iconfactory, they run the very real risk of becoming casualties. We need to light a fire under Apple that makes sure they do the inevitable as quickly as possible, before it’s too late for our colleagues and friends.
Faced with an unbeatable enemy, Gandhi called a boycott. Armed with nothing but force of will, Martin Luther King Jr called a boycott. If great men like these were developing apps, they would say the same thing: boycott.
What I propose is this: for every API that is infected by parasites, we cut off the branch and boycott the API. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect to be able to use an API without being sued, the same way it’s not unreasonable to expect to use an API without getting spam.
If having 3,000 updates hit the app store “removing in app purchase to avoid being sued” doesn’t get Apple to move, the revenue loss surely will.