Back in the day, I was heavily involved in reverse engineering iTunes to figure out the "authentication" hash sent with DAAP requests. I very quickly got sick of chasing my tail every time Apple unilaterally decided to change their protocols for the sole reason to disable third party interoperation, incidentally breaking old versions of their own software just for the hell of it.

I'm sick of Apple and all their works. If you're a software engineer, and you value open standards and competition, you should never, ever buy an Apple product. Their anti-competitive actions, from breaking their software through misusing legal instruments right up to controlling which apps one can and cannot write for the iPhone, reveal a fundamental distaste for standards, co-operation and even the law.

Every moment spent trying to interoperate with Apple is a moment wasted. For the free software community, most of us have stopped chasing our tail and gone to open standards such as UPnP media streaming. Apple's culture is that of the 70s, the dark ages of personal computing. I can only hope that people inside their organisation like Stuart Cheshire can make some sort of operational change.