Walking out on Apple

Apple had a lot of announcements today and there is some wonderful stuff coming out of the company as usual. I also still love my iBook. But I have to agree with Russell’s post. This one is about the fact that Apple has seemingly copied Konfabulator. They already did it with Watson (called Sherlock in Apple) too. And the thing is that the Konfabulator copy isn’t really something you’d need in OS X, but it will still push the Konfabulator people out of business. This is not good. They could have bought them if they wanted to. Russell suggests that the developers walk out at tomorrow’s WWDC, which might be a good idea.

I am torn here. I do love that there is so much stuff readily available in OS X, but if I imagine that MS would boundle all this stuff with Windows, they would be right back in court.

Update : Thijs pointed me to this post shedding a little different light on the issue. It’s very well written and gives a good idea on the history of things like widgets, differences in coding between them and a few other interesting insights on other “rip-offs” by Apple.

I do get the point, and I should probably not get as pissed as I did when I started this post. The problem really runs a lot deeper. With development of applications getting easier, development environments improving, the move from idea to finished product gets easier, and it gets easier to rip-off if you want. The question is if you should, especially in the case where it’s a wise decision, for which ever reason. Is it more important to add something like they did now, or is it more important to provide technology to allow others to do that. Then again, that’s really what they did. They made available a system that allows you to build little applications. It’s a good idea really.