taking a leak from Apple
January 6th, 2005 | Tags: computing | 2 Comments
John Gruber patiently explains to the Apple-speculation set why product leaks and rumor-mongering raise ire in Cupertino. Even given the Internet’s vast capacity to facilitate discussion among groups of people who seriously entertain ridiculous ideas (e.g. here and here), I am flat-out shocked at the amount of negative commentary directed at Apple over this. Apparently, there are a very large number of people who don’t understand contract law, don’t recognize that a company might well pursue civil action against entities encouraging breach of contract — indeed, it seems many don’t even realize that anyone with enough “inside information” to engage in product release information leaking is liable to be NDA-ed to the gills!
January 7th, 2005 at 10:38:25 AM (#)
Please, Apple stole code and ICONS from the Linux project to add into their OS. They eve run a BSD backend, might as well give the OS away for free.
January 8th, 2005 at 02:10:20 AM (#)
I have no idea what you’re talking about — when did Apple steal icons? I used Linux exclusively for seven years before switching to OS X, and I can’t say the Mac icons are anything but a step up.
As far as code goes, OS X includes many GNU utilities and BSD tools, but so do most commercial Unix-like systems. (Whether these are included in the base install or on a skunkworks CD is irrelevant.) Both kinds of redistribution are legal given the terms under which the Free tools are licensed — and value-added redistribution (or building entire systems on top of open-source infrastructure) has been a fine business model for many companies, including Cygnus, Red Hat, TiVo, and more.
Finally, none of this is germane to the issue of NDA violation and suing to plug leaks (viz., the topic of my post). So, what’s your point?