Hacker News Reader

Bear in mind, however, that reverse engineering is also respected at Apple (or it used to be, a couple years ago). I remember reading a story where Steve Jobs personally visited and tried to buy Dropbox, because they reverse engineered Apple's file system, or something like that.

View on HN

Don't know why they'd need to do that, what i suspect it could be would be reverse engineering the kernel interface to add their own. That way they can do a very much nicer automatic sync with their service that won't have as many issues. I believe they do it that way on linux with FUSE and with IFS on windows.

Dropbox is just a folder — the reverse engineering was to inject themselves into the Finder for their custom icons and context menus.

Ever heard "do as I say, not as I do"? :) That's Apple talking to us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com