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Comment by MBlume | Hacker News Reader

I've said this before and I'll say it again. One of the villains in this piece is Apple. Many of the people reading this comment are talented engineers. What Apple needs to survive, more than anything, are talented engineers. So don't work at Apple. Don't work for companies that compromise ethics in this way.

There's a reason Microsoft has been failing to compete for a while. It's because its practices got so evil that if you got offered a job there, your friends would make ha-ha-only-serious jokes about you going to work for Darth Vader. And so the best engineers, the one with options, went looking elsewhere. We need a culture like this now around Oracle, around Apple.

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I mean, take a look at this quote:

The founders of the company marketing this app are speech-language pathologists who were trained by PRC, and who used their knowledge of the Unity system to develop a Unity-like app of their own and market it in the Apple iTunes store.

If PRC was able to prove that to Apple, you hadn't read the OP but PRC had posted something about how people they trained stole their technology, would you direct the word "villain" towards Apple, PRC, or the makers of SpeakForYourself?

If I had a choice I'd keep the app on the app store. But, its important to keep a cool head and consider things objectively.

Source: http://www.facebook.com/PrentkeRomichCompany

Absent a court-ordered injuction, Apple has no obligation to read, let alone give credence to anyone's claims in this matter, and that's exactly what they should have done: let the courts sort it out. Make PRC get the injuction, don't just give it to them for free.

Exactly this. Apple is, IMHO, in the wrong here because they have acted in advance of a court decision, thereby making themselves the arbiter of a patent claim, not the courts.

Actions like this only serve to highlight the dangers with the walled-garden approach... or maybe, better said, by acting in this way, Apple makes the walled-garden of iOS a less attractive environment for developers and reduces the motivation to innovate using their platform.

Yes Apple is in the wrong but (and possibly I'm giving them too much credit in terms of their corporate unity) maybe their actions are an effort to not weaken the veracity of their own patent claims. Whereby any leniency shown by Apple in the case of other entities patent claims could be used in court against Apple when they are defending their own.

Apple has done it because they are getting 30% of the sale fee from software that is potentially infringing someone's patent. They could be sued for that quite easily if the makers of SfY went bankrupt. It's a no brainer for a corporate heirarchy to choose to pull it from the store. Doesn't make it ethically squeaky clean.

They don't have any obligation to do so, but in most case you'll probably want them to: you built an application on your own, over 6 months of your life, and a guy cracked, replicated and uploaded it. Surely you'll want his app thrown out even without having to go through court won't you?

But this is being handled in court. Apple was notified of this and did nothing for a while and then removed it.

Of course I'd love to have the other guys app taken down if it copied mine. But I'd also want to know that I'm safe against spurious claims of copying from someone else.

If I have to choose one of the two, I'd choose the latter.

I'd not want Apple to be judge, jury and executioner, because they have no legal obligation to ensure a fair, transparent and equitable process, and so the more willing they are to take unilateral action, the greater the risk for me of relying on them for income is.

In fact, given stuff like this, I'm very happy not to be dependent on any income from the app store that can be just yanked away at a moments notice without any real recourse.

"cracked" is a bit of a stretch, isn't it?

The engineers used their knowledge on speech-synthesizers to make a similar app. Just like an Airport engineer leaving Apple to build wi-fi devices, or an iPod engineer using his knowledge of hardware and interfaces to build modern thermostats. Hmmm...

> "cracked" is a bit of a stretch, isn't it?

It's not a stretch of anything because it's not in any way, shape or form a qualifier for the case at hand but an example used in making the case for "gatekeepers" acting without court orders if they believe that is for the best of their keep.

Apple's needlessly abusive design is the sole reason you don't have that choice. They reserved for themselves the power to obstruct the author's use of her own tools, which should be a human right second only to food and shelter.

Apple doesn't obstruct her from using Android.

Again, I vote that the app stays up. But you are being silly by portraying Apple as evil.

Don't Apple devices have locked bootloaders? I think it's a little disingenuous to say that Apple doesn't obstruct her from using Android when they have gone to a lot of trouble to ensure you can't run Android on an iPad. (Not to say you can't, but Apple has intentionally put up barriers to prevent it.)

I meant what I said more literally than you took it.

Apple doesn't obstruct her from using Android. She can choose not to use Apple products.

Edit: keep in mind this is what I was replying to:

They reserved for themselves the power to obstruct the author's use of her own tools, which should be a human right second only to food and shelter.

Apple doesn't own the product; they sold it to her, and shouldn't obstruct her from using it as she sees fit. Your sentiment seems to imply that no one actually buys anything from Apple, they merely rent, and Apple rightly has the final say over how the renter uses the product. I don't see how the idea that she can simply choose to use another product really makes sense unless she's renting it.

This is a good argument.

Someone probably sold you a microwave. How easy is it to install Linux on it? They haven't provided you a way to and may have even erected barriers to stop you from doing so. Wouldn't that put any and all embedded device/"appliance" manufacturer in the same boat?

As far as I know, Apple doesn't want people to think of the iPad as a "computer" but as a device or appliance.

I'm a vegetarian; I see what Apple has done as more akin to selling a microwave that detects when there's meat in it and refuses to power on. Sorry, it's not a microwave, it's a vegetable cooker.

But then Microsoft never obstructed anyone from using Macs instead. That line of argumentation didn't seem to interest the courts much.

Microsoft had a monopoly, >95% market share at the time of the anti-trust suit. They deliberately blocked other OSes from manufacturers' PCs (BeOS, for instance, from Compaq's lineup). Apple may have the largest single share, but they are not in a monopoly position.

Well, iOS is also the only OS to run on iDevices. You can't switch to Android on your iPhone, you need to get a new phone altogether, just like you would've had to get a new Mac, instead of just installing another(BeOS) OS.

Actually, BeOS ran on macs. But the point remains, Apple is not in the market position to force out OS competition. They're in a position to make Their consumer device run their OS more easily than an alternate OS. They don't prevent anyone else from launching Android or Windows mobile devices, and they aren't in a position to. Their strongest anti-consumer position is the app store (in the sense that there is a gateway preventing consumer choice), but if you really care you can get around it by jail breaking, or just leave the platform. And if developers cared about their position, they should flood the android market with the apps needed to drive consumers away from iOS.

I guess Apple should keep it in the store and take one on the chin when they get sued for millions of dollars by the patent holders. It's not like they have anything better to do.

It is important to keep a cool head and consider things objectively. That's why I think it's manipulative to inject emotion into this like the post does. It's one thing to empathize with this poor mother and quite another to consider the facts and have an honest, serious discussion. What has happened to this family is awful. There's no question about that and I feel just as bad for them as anyone. But now we can't expect anyone to keep a cool head because of the way the issue was presented. Injecting emotion into the discussion is manipulative and effectively halts any critical thinking that might have gone on otherwise.

I think the emotional price paid by this family is part of the discussion, however.

Disagree. In the comments on HN we are free to discuss this without emotion, or referring to emotion but keeping it in check with logical arguments that respect the system, the inventor(s) and the critical user.

I find it unreasonable to expect a mother, on her personal blog, to keep the same detached sentiment when her child's literal voice is threatened.

Emotion is not an inherently bad thing. It has a bad name among us geeks because it sometimes creeps into purely technical discussions where it has no place, to be sure. But when an unjust law is used to perpetrate evil - and make no mistake, that's what's happening here - the emotion of anger is entirely justified and appropriate.

A simpler explanation is that Microsoft's fortunes are tied to the PC. As that market matured, so did MS's profits. Now PC's are being disrupted by ARM/touch/mobile devices and their OS's, and MS is not dominating that area - just as Christensen's theory predicts. Of course, you'll be happier working for a company you like.

  Note 1: MS made $5.11B profit last year.
  Note 2: Apple's star is rising with the new devices.

Just a small note: MS made $5.1b in profit last quarter, and $23.1b in profit for its fiscal 2011 year.

I don't agree that public shaming is the primary reason for Microsoft's demise -- there are lots of people who are attracted to work for the least ethical firms, just like Wall Street.

But, I agree with you, there should be more shaming when working for certain companies or in certain jobs. For instance, the companies that produce internet filters that are suitable for monitoring the traffic of entire countries.

I would definitely add Google to that list as well.

Their continued support of Motorola Mobility's behaviour in abusing FRAND rules is unconscionable and has the ability to undermine the entire industry.

I really feel you are grasping straws there. Motorola is only defending itself against Microsoft's patent attack.

Except, as far as I know, Motorola is leveraging FRAND, standards necessary patents and Microsoft wasn't. There is a large difference.

How comes that the VFAT patent (held my Microsoft) is not considered FRAND?

After all, it's part of the UEFI specs, SD card specs, and so on. And what about the new exFAT stuff (required for some of the newer SD specs, SDXC or something like that)?

Microsoft certainly leverages those (esp. the VFAT stuff) against Linux in general, and Android specifically.

It is all about the dtandards body. I don't know which orgs are responsible for UEFI specs and SD format specs. It's up to the standards body to demand FRAND licensing.

There aren't any international standards that demand a vfat file system, are there? Are the vfat patents still in force, because I haven't payed anyone for those on any of my Linux systems. Is SD an ISO standard or just a consortium standard? (I don't know)

I'm not trying to say Microsoft has the cleanest hands with respect to patents, but in this case, it seems clear cut.

Quoting from Wikipedia (they link to the lawsuit):

"In October 2010, Microsoft filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Motorola alleging several patents (including two of the FAT32 file system patents) were not licensed for use in the Android operating system."

If you think these patents are valid and that Microsoft should be permitted to demand licensing for them despite the direct connection to the monopoly they abused... well, I hope you don't use FAT32 on any of your Linux systems or that you're planning to call up someone in Redmond ASAP.

The VFAT patent isn't FRAND because it was just a de-facto standard that became popular because it was compatible with over 95% of desktop and laptop computers at one point in time.

Of course, you'd think that a convicted monopolist might have some obligations with respect to licensing patents essential to de-facto standards created by the same monopoly power. In today's world, unfortunately, you'd be wrong.

There might be a difference legally, but that doesn't mean Microsofts behavior still isn't far more disgusting.

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