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Dashboard Not a Konfabulator Rip-off
MacNN writes "John Gruber says the origins of Apple's Dashboard technology, announced as part of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger earlier this week, are not with Arlo Rose's Konfabulator, but with Apple's original Desk Accessories and that Apple's Webcore-based implementation will allow many more developers/designers to create 'gadgets' much more easily and that Dashboard's 'gadgets' will offer much better performance: 'Dashboard is not a rip-off of Konfabulator. Yes, they are doing very much the same thing. But what it is that they're doing was not an original idea to Konfabulator. The scope of a 'widget' is very much the modern-day equivalent of a desk accessory.'"
Sure, it made logical sense for Sherlock to move in that direction, but to not even give credit after recognizing the developer one year past always seemed odd.
They *did* offer him a job, repeatedly, to work on Sherlock. He declined, repeatedly, seeking compensation for the work he'd *already* done. That's pretty shady if you ask me.
First, look at the Apple Developer Connection Inside Macintosh: Devices Device Manager chapter on Writing a Desk Accessory. Next, read Netscape's Sidebar Developer's Guide. Then, read the Konfabulator Widget XML and Javascript Reference documentation. Finally, read Apple's own marketing description of the Dashboard technology. Now, do Dashboard and Konfabulator sound to you like two unrelated descendants of Desk Accessories (on parallel branches), or does it sound to you like there's a progression in development technologies from Desk Accessories to Sidebars to Konfabulator to Dashboard?
Next, ask yourself this question: if Konfabulator were made by Real Technologies, and Dashboard were part of Windows, would the DoJ be investigating? Even if Apple isn't copying the technology of Konfabulator, they are clearly poaching on Konfabulator's market. Now, there's nothing either illegal or immoral about this - that's the way business is done, sometimes - unless you happen to be a monopoly trying to drive competitors out of business.
Apple's position is not as a monopoly trying to fend off potential competitors, but as a platform champion which SHOULD be trying to expand its market share by expanding the capabilities and the desirability of its platform. By embracing Open Source and UNIX-based technologies, Apple seemed to be moving to expand its developer base and thus the capabilities and desirability of its platform. Apple could choose to be offer a wide-ranging alternative, or it could choose to marginalize itself in the pursuit of total control over its niche.
So it was depressingly stupid marketing of Apple to introduce Dashboard at WWDC. The audience of the WWDC isn't an audience of potential dashboard widget developers - they aren't HTML/JavaScript folks. The audience of the WWDC are independent developers - and they were treated with a wonderful object lesson of how Apple treats independent developers who try to improve the platform and introduce new technologies with the potential to increase the adaptability and desirability of the platform: Apple crushes them in a Keynote. Adobe dropped Premiere because of Final Cut Pro - and we all thought it was OK (I thought it was OK; I have a copy myself) because Final Cut Pro is a better product and is focused purely on the Apple Platform. MS is dropping IE, probably because of Safari - and we thought it was OK (certainly I thought it was OK) because Safari was based upon an Open Source framework (KHTML) and was giving back to the community, and IE is IE - it controls the market, it's Goliath, and it was good to see Apple give us a David to root for. What are we going to do when Apple goes after Alias, or BareBones, or Intuit? Probably root for Apple. But when Apple crushes all the Arlo Roses of the world, who's going to be left to write software for our precious Macs?