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Comment by nathanb | Hacker News Reader

I have no great love for Apple, but the rhetoric around this is simply ridiculous. When a great app comes out, tech sites will say things like "why isn't this a feature of the OS?", but then when they become a feature then the OS vendor gets criticized for "stabbing" app developers.

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For starters, Apple is known for taking an idea that has many 3rd party solutions, incorporating it into the OS, then presenting it as their own whizz-bang idea. (See Spotlight vs Butler/QuickSilver/LaunchBar)

nathanb: why is Apple being criticized for doing X?

pyre: Apple is doing X.

Your comment doesn't really address the question, which is, "Why criticize Apple for not implementing it, then criticize them later for implementing it like you asked them to?"

It does. It has less to do with Apple implementing it or not, and more to do with Apple's lack of acknowledgement of where their inspiration came from. At least in my mind.

It's sort of like the difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Or the mindset where NBC will bother dedicating time in their nightly news to cover iCloud (stop looking at me that way, yes some people still watch the nightly news) and voila, the general public thinks apple invented the idea of the cloud. Great for Apple, annoying for us that think Jobs doesn't walk on water.

Is this like when that band you liked suddenly got popular so you didn't like them anymore?

Or is it more like when Roman from Party Down met that girl who was "really into Sci Fi" and she started talking about Lord of the Rings and then he berated her with the difference between Fantasy and Sci Fi?

Of course Steve doesn't walk on water. The engineers do. Seriously though, iCloud is a major undertaking and it's unclear whether it'll work as advertised. 200+M devices getting synced daily is quite a feat.

The first rule of not copyright infringement club is to not go around saying you were inspired by X. Start a billion dollar company then ask your lawyers if you don't believe me.

You can't copyright an idea.

Wait you started the copyright analogy. The bottom line is you can get sued over anything and saying "we're copying X" is a good way to get sued imho.

Compare some of the apps Apple just "killed" with Lala, Coverflow; the latter just seem like a win-win to me. Even if it's not technically the best deal for Apple the developer good will might just be worth it.

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