Apple: Innovate Doesn’t Mean Stealing
I am not a huge fan of Konfabulator. It’s a lot of fun the first few times you use it but the plethora of widgets can get irritating after a while. However, I do rely on a couple throughout the day, and love checking out konfabulator.com to see what latest innovation the great community of developers have come up with.
Whether one likes Konfabulator or not is not entirely the point here. One can’t help but be shocked at Apple’s blatant rip off of Konfabulator with the new preview of Dashboard. Integrating web search like features a la Watson into Sherlock was one thing—at least Apple already had a find function. But stealing the whole desktop widget idea and using as an “innovation” in a new operating system is a whole other level of low.
Dashboard is an exact copy of Konfabulator. The visual design is the same, the technology is the same, and even the terminology of “widgets” is the same. If I was the product manager of Dashboard at Apple I’d be ashamed. All Apple has done is take the hard work of Apple developers and copied it. Legally, Apple may be ok. Ethically it is in the wrong. Why didn’t Apple try to acquire Konfabulator, taking the community of developers along with it? Why try to isolate a developer who is clearly dedicated to the platform?
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Stealing the desktop widget idea? ROFLMAO. Konfabulator is nothing more than a spiffy UI on top of Desk Accessories. This idea is wholly unoriginal and therefore unpatentable. There is so much prior art on this its a laugh.
Think about it. Apple has only encroached on developers of derivative products. Watson…merely a better implemented Sherlock. Liteswitch X- geez where’d “they” get that nifty idea to use Alt-tab. Konfabulator…plenty of people have used widgets.
Is it fair…yes. Is it nice…perhaps not but here in American you get protected for orginal ideas not pilfering another idea and making it slicker. All is fair in love and war.
I agree with the previous comment. This is Apple’s Operating System - they can do what ever they want. It’s great that people develop for the Mac. What prevents Konfabulator creators from coming up with something else? Everything is obsoleted with a given period of time within the computer industry.
Aren’t the Konfabulator people related somehow to Kaleidoscope? Come up with something new - maybe like Mac Screen Pivoting software and then Apple - please copy it soon.
Ahh, isn’t the world small?
I actually worked with one of the creators of Konfabulator - who also created Kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscope itself being a copy of the Appearance Control Panel in OS 8/9. He states he developed Themes and the resulting Appearance CP while at Apple, and after quitting developed Kaleidoscope because Apple dropped full implementation of themes. I also knew the designers of these initial Apple themes, however the Konfab. creator’s name was never mentioned.
so the circle of “copying” is just goin’ round the horn. I am not apologizing for Apple here, but this is merely indicative of the field. Is it ethically okay? It is if your ethics are relative… which I dare say most are.
The state of Mac is so much different today, Apple is finally responsive, innovating in applications and not just the hardware and OS. Why are themes not so prevalent today? Because the vast majority that used Kaleidoscope are happy with OS X and its appearance.
Apple is clearly taking control of their destiny. If you watched the WWDC keynote - you had to have had your jaw drop multiple times throughout. The state of the Mac is so strong now, you really cannot understand why people still use Windows.
As a last note, Kaleidoscope is a fantastic shareware program, really a model of what shareware can be. I don’t want to take anything away from it. I think the creators are handling the Dashboard vs. Konfab fine, and while they are not exactly happy - I am sure they understand they will sell even more copies of Konfabulator than they would have if Apple never took notice.
Well I don’t know that the problem is what Apple is doing to developers (by robbing the value of Watson, Konfabulator, Launchbar, NetNewsWire) but rather what they are doing to themselves. If they continue to reduce the value of independent innovation (and Launchbar was a true innovation that Spotlight seems to duplicate) then soon there won’t be a flood of new ideas that they can harvest to be the top three features of an OS release two years from now.
Since when have OS developers not borrowed from innovative ideas grown in shareware or published applications. Microsoft has long been a leader of flattery payment for copied goodness. Remember the disk compression of Dos 5? Stacker does. Most people will probably say whose stacker? My goodness in this case they are only borrowing from themselves (I don’t know if I can place a link to any site here but you can link from my blog to the original article I’m referring to at [url=http://www.minezamac.com]http://www.minezamac.com )[/url] on folklore.org there is an article about desktop ornaments from 1981 that is exactly what later became desk accessories and then etc. that shows it is all just an evolving improving idea. Konfabulator is a great app but it isn’t a new idea. It really more of a javascript developers framework than a desktop accessory app. So instead of getting pissed at Apple be glad someone there had a light-bulb go off and say “you know it would be nice if I could get at my calculator or whatever when I do this and it then go away”.
I purchased my copy of Watson. I never would of guessed it was a limited license that would be expiring. I’m in the wrong business. I grow table grapes. Once I sell a box to NY city, it is gone forever. I want to do what Karelia does. Sell the box to NY city and then sell it again to Sun and write a self serving note telling my customer in NY that he got to look (but not eat) at the box for a few days before I re-sold it to Sun . So what is your problem bub? Pay me.
And to think I purchased Watson after I saw the cheap Sherlock imitation thinking I didn’t like the way Apple imitated the interface. Now i say screw Karelia and screw this Rose “widget” ass also. Hell, if you developer folks can’t stop buying grapes in the supermarket from mexico (no pesticide inspection) where they pay $8/day to their workers vs my $80/day (while I suffer ungodly government regulation also) and support USA grown product then why should I care in the least if Apple is integrating this technology into their OS? I don’t think I do. I don’t think I own worldwide rights to grapes. I don’t think Karelia/Rose own worldwide rights to applets. I have to compete by continuing to grow better products cheaper each and every year. And now mexico is suffering because they can’t compete with my quality. Sometimes I have to remove acres of varieties at an expense of millons just because that perticular grape fell out of favor with the US public. I do it all at my expense. Hell, you folks don’t give it a second thought when it comes to buying my grapes, you just look for the cheapest price. If they are mexican, well so what if they are cheaper. Well I’m gonna do the same here and you developers stop crying and compete. It takes a little education and a computer to be a developer. It takes acres, employees, education and millons of dollars of capital to grow grapes. But you developers are looking for deals on grapes just as I am looking for deals on my computer. I’ll intice you to buy mine by making them better, not by crying in my beer. Do the same and shut up.
Rob - I think you are kinda on the wrong track. If you put the situation in the perspective of the iPod interface: Apple is pro-actively protecting their IP. They can do so because they have an army of lawyers, resources, and time to do so.
Independent Developers can do no such thing. In fact the only recourse they have is to make a stink via message boards, hoping that it will influence enough of the public to make Apple acquiesce in some way.
In a sense, I agree that Apple borrowed a little too heavily from Konfab. Altho if you look at the K widgets - the only ones that look like Dashboard widgets are the ones Arlo designed. And his design is heavily influenced by Aqua. In terms of architecture, JavaScript is used by many companies - Macromedia, Adobe are major companies that use it for a basis of their own scripting engines. As for usage, its already ben established that earlier Apple Desktop Accessories had established prior art.
It is ironic that on the day that Apple unveils Dashboard the developer of Watson announced that the product has been sold and development will cease on the program. I’m a regular user of Watson and I am sad to see that groundbreaking program retiring too soon. At the same time, I’m glad that Apple “borrowed” concepts from Watson and incorporated them in Sherlock 3. Sherlock is a much more useful utility and now all OS X users can take advantage of the innovations first introduced in Watson.
I have no idea what proportion of OS X users own Konfabulator, but I doubt it is even 10%, so if the idea has merit, incorporating it into the OS is the best way of increasing adoption. What is at issue is Apple’s strategy of making no effort to license the work of others, but instead recreating very similar functionalities in core OS X applications. Rather than increasing goodwill amongst the Apple developer community by acknowledging the contributions of others through the highest compliment of purchasing a technology, there is a serious undermining of developer trust and good faith through this aggressive strategy of acquiring the ideas of others and calling them your own.
Others have pointed out that the developers of Konfabulator didn’t invent the concept of Desk Accessories or widgets, and certainly Watson wasn’t the first program to retrieve and present data from web sources. Yet Apple’s own implementation of these same concepts bears such a striking resemblance to both products as to be nearly indistinguishable from these prior works. This is an ethical issue, more than a legal quibble of what is protected by copyright, and I come down firmly on the side of saying that Apple’s behavior here really stinks. While I appreciate Apple’s obligation to its stockholders and its users, it also has a contract of trust to maintain with its developer community and that contract is looking rather hollow at the moment. Perhaps most sad is that the developers at WWDC applauded Dashboard rather than booing it off the stage. There is plenty of shame to go around.
Undoubtedly having Dashboard as part of the core OS is preferable to its being a third party product. This is a win for users, but while we may benefit from the blatant copying of the work of Mac developers, we do so at the expense of the emotional suffering and the financial harm caused to others. The world of business is often cruel and exploitive and it will remain so as long as we consumers tolerate unethical behavior simply because we too benefit from the screwing over of the little guy by big corporations.
I disagree with David. The issue here is that protection of intellectual property costs a lot of money. Ethically, Apple is not treading on any toes here. Watson following the Apple Human Computer Interface guidelines. Thus the UI and behavior mimicked Sherlock first, but one could say Watson merely was a design based on Apple HCI as all Mac OS X utilities should. The only foot the developers could stand on is proving that their concept was original, and existed in the market before Sherlock 3.
They could definitely make a case that their particular implementation (but not user interface) was original, and it definitely existed prior to Sherlock 3… but wither would the money come from? This a basic flaw in the justice system.
In science, the idea of publishing work is the way of life. Being “scooped” on a discovery is a part of life. You have to present your research, get it peer reviewed, and if you don’t do it fast or smart enough - other who you just showed it to are doing their own work based on yours.
And when they scoop your work, and their own article gets published in Nature, your name is not on their paper. But yet it is fine (it hurts) but then you read their research, and utilize it to move your own work forward.
How is software development any ethically different?
Nathan,
You mean “academic” science. In commercial science, ideas are kept secret, patented, and sold as intellecutual property so the inventors get wealthy and sit on the boards of companies with lots of stock options. THEN they publish everything….
As the matter of fact, most of the academic science out there works this way too…