Apple Still Says No To Aqua-Like Themes

JoFo writes: "Eric Yang, creator of several Aqua-like themes and skins for GTK+, KDE, Mozilla, gkrellm, and others, was forced by Apple to take down all Aqua-related projects on his web site. It appears they went to his employer as a way to strong-arm him. He writes on his web site 'I went to Apple to test cocoa for Mac OS X 10.1, and found a drag and drop problem with NSPopUpButtonCell. They didn't even pay me for my effort, yet they try to shut down my project. Isn't that ironic?'" Apple seems at least to be consistent in objecting to nearly any non-Apple project that reminds the company of Aqua, so maybe this was just a matter of time.

Comments

why is this such a big deal?

[woodja]

This might be flame bait for some, but why are we so upset about companies wanting to keep their own image?

Of all things to fight about, it seems that the appearance of a desktop should be the least of our worries. If Apple wants to keep their Aqua desktop to themselves, fine. Let's be creative and make something better. There are many themes out there that rival Apple in functionality and appearance.

Why are people pissed at Apple?

[veddermatic]

Apple is wary for reasons:

Microshaft stole thier implementation of Xerox's "desktop" operating system and ruined thier OS business.

Then a clone maker came along for IBM hardware and ruined the margin on making machines.

Apple has been screwed by others since the day computers became available to the people.

Regardless of my (or your) opinions of thier hardware, software, OSes, and so on, if you were Apple, would you not fight with every single fiber of you being to protect everything you could?

They are not going after people for money... they are simply saying "we made Aqua, at consideralbe expense (and again, I don't care what you think of it... it cost them heaps of money to develop) so please don't give it away to other platforms".

Windows XP, Linux, or whatever does not DESERVE a GUI as nice as Mac OS X. My mom can buy a crappy box with Win XP and be frustraed by it. Having an OS X look alike theme could amke her biased agiant Macs. My mom would have no f*ing clue how to use Linux, so if see ever had to use a machine with Linux installed, and it had an Aqua theme, she might think that So X was hard to use. I *did* buy my mom an iMac, and installed OS X on it. She damn well humps the machine she loves it so much.

So porting one is not only an infrigement of copyright, but just plain wrong as well.