With this week's preview of Tiger, the next version of OS X, Apple fans and Apple developers have criticized the company for including imitiations of popular independent web apps.
Some have even ventured to guess the "big cat" codename for 10.5, Tiger's successor: "Copycat."
UPDATE: Gruber says that the Dashboard/Konfabulator imbroglio is really no big deal:
Yes, no argument about it, Dashboard is a Konfabulator-killer. Their gadgets and widgets are serving the same exact purpose. I.e., the answer to the question What do they do? is the same. But the answer to the question How are they doing it? is completely different.
And since the concept of what these apps do has been around for literally decades, the Konfabulator folks don't have a legal or even a moral leg to stand on.
Winer opines: "So there are worse things than Apple stealing good ideas from developers, it's Apple *not* stealing good ideas from developers."
Posted by wasylik at June 30, 2004 08:23 AM | TrackBack