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by Ben Last.
Original Post: Theft Is Non-Commutative
Feed Title: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
Feed URL: http://benlast.livejournal.com/data/rss
Feed Description: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
Apparently, Apple have stolen at least one idea in their new OS. Stolen is a harsh word, but it's a perfectly good interpretation of the term "plundered". Yet; hang on a moment... I don't remember any accusations of theft being levelled at open source projects that take ideas from one platform and implement them on another, whether they call it "inspiration" or are as open and honest as the xmms people about their borrowing from Winamp. So why is it a problem if Apple do it?
It'd be a misrepresentation of the worst kind to state that the open-source community is against intellectual property; hell, I'm an OSS advocate and I make my living from IP. But there is, I think, a general agreement that patents and other forms of restriction should apply only to certain classes of IP; that patenting look-and-feel, for example, is a Bad Idea. It's always seemed to me that redoing someone else's Cool Application (only doing it better, as one always tries to) is well within the bounds of acceptability. Unless Apple do it. Maybe I'm missing something.
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