Showing messages 1 through 4 of 4.

• Mad over nothing
  2004-07-01 07:10:06  jamie.folsom@post.harvard.edu [View]
  
  
  While Dave Hyatt, Jon Gruber, and several others have made interesting, and informative contributions to this "controversy", they have missed the important point.
  
  Should Apple be able to create Dashboard, and thereby eat Konfabulator's lunch? Of course. Should they have to buy and use the code the Rose and Co. wrote, if they can do it better? Of course not. Do they owe a dime to Rose? Of course not. All of that is not the point.
  
  Could they for a very small investment of courtesy, money, recognition, do right by Rose? Absolutely. That's not even the real point here.
  
  Could Apple, by not antagonizing the makers of Watson, and Liteswitch X and Konfabulator, energize a legion of amateur and professional programmers to provide more free help of the kind that Rose provided: prototyping, market research, buzz generation? Yes. Would they sell macs to those people, and their customers? Yes. That is the point.
  
  It is precisely those of us that don't know what happened between the parties in this mess (myself included), that have the best vantage point from which to view it. It is to us that Apple is sending the message that if you're like this guy, you'll probably get squashed, so don't try it.
  
  That there is a controversy at all, is bad for Apple and for the platform.
  
  Could they for a very small investment of courtesy, money, recognition, do right by Rose? Absolutely. That's not even the real point here.
  
  Could Apple, by not antagonizing the makers of Watson, and Liteswitch X and Konfabulator, energize a legion of amateur and professional programmers to provide more free help of the kind that Rose provided: prototyping, market research, buzz generation? Yes. Would they sell macs to those people, and their customers? Yes. That is the point.
  
  It is precisely those of us that don't know what happened between the parties in this mess (myself included), that have the best vantage point from which to view it. It is to us that Apple is sending the message that if you're like this guy, you'll probably get squashed, so don't try it.
  
  That there is a controversy at all, is bad for Apple and for the platform.
  
• Mad over nothing
  2004-07-10 08:10:45  MEP [View]
  
  
  "Could Apple, by not antagonizing the makers of Watson, and Liteswitch X and Konfabulator, energize a legion of amateur and professional programmers to provide more free help of the kind that Rose provided: prototyping, market research, buzz generation? Yes."
  
  Apple could reward the Konfabulator guys for doing the early design work for them. They could reward every indie developer who fills a gap in OS X. And that would encourage more programmers to use their time to do these things.
  
  But that opens a Pandora's Box of new problems. You yourself use the term "legions" to describe the potential outbreak of new developers. What happens when all of them want a piece of Apple's pie? How much can Apple afford to pay before they start losing? Why should they pay for ideas if they're just going to rewrite the whole thing from scratch anyway (as they did in Dashboard)? Where does Apple draw the line between innovation that deserves recognition and derivative work?
  
  Surely you don't feel the LiteSwitchX developers deserve any money from Apple. After all, the primary feature of their program has existed for decades in Windows and X and even earlier versions of the Mac OS. It was only a matter of time before Apple closed that very obvious hole in their software. LiteSwitch was just a stopgap solution and the developers themselves should've been well aware of that fact or they were just kidding themselves.
  
  Likewise with the Konfabulator folks. What they've done is not really new. Konfabulator is similar in many ways to shell extensions and replacements (like LiteStep for instance or the many window managers available for X Windows). The primary difference is in the ease of developing widgets due to the Javascript and XML engine it's based on.
  
  The idea is not new at all, merely the execution of that idea.
  
  Apple is not using their execution of the idea. They've developed their own system using the WebKit as it's core. Why should they pay Rose for an idea that's not really his?
  
  I'm with Gruber on this issue. Rose et al. made the wrong product. They should've developed a useful and powerful widget IDE and sold it while giving away Konfabulator for free. They could've adapted that product to Dashboard and continued onward. Hell, Apple might have even bought that product if it was good enough. Instead they chose to develop an application with an obvious shelf-life, and now it's expired. I feel sorry for them since their going to lose a lot of revenue, but I can't honestly say that they didn't bring this upon themselves.
• Mad over nothing
  2004-07-06 02:47:55  sanchonevesgraca [View]
  
  
  Gruber makes a very important point about a fundamental choice that third-party developers should make: either develop an application or develop a runtime. The developers of Konfabulator chose to develop a runtime so the outcome is not surprising. As far as copying a design is concerned, Apple did not copy a design, since they have for a long time established their Mac look-and-feel. Software is by and large a business, so players should expect business moves. No one should expect charity such as 'giving out a hand' to indie developers. Perhaps the makers of Konfabulator would have found a more suitable home for their product on a Linux desktop with an open source license, so that Linux users would be free to use the Konfabulator runtime based on its technical merits alone.
• Absolutely not!
  2004-07-02 00:06:45  brianimator2 [View]
  
  
  "Could they for a very small investment of courtesy, money, recognition, do right by Rose? Absolutely. "
  
  No way - you know what kind of legal sh*tstorm that would expose Apple to? And for what? What is Konfabulator doing that hasn't been done before? Why should Apple pay Arlo and Co. for the right to use the Aqua look and feel???