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Is Apple The New Microsoft?
Varg Vikernes writes "Even if you don't count Apple's actions this week as a potential threat to first amendment rights (Apple's crackdown on Web sites that love the company), they do nothing to bolster Apple's public image. In fact the company's success of late has yielded accusations of bullying and potentially unlawful business tactics, along with complaints about the fact that songs purchased from its iTunes music service don't work with music players other than its own. According to Forbes, to some these tactics sound like something Apple's neighbor to the North might employ. They wonder aloud Is Apple the New Microsoft?
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
We saw how Apple treated the clone system builders, and BeOS for that matter.
Apple decided that being driven out of business by clone manufactures wasn't in their best interests, and wisely decided to stop the licensing that was allowing that to happen. You'll have to elaborate on what they did to BeOS, other than not buy them.
[Apple is] a corporation, and frankly I'm not surprised in the slightest at their attempts to monopolise music downloads and attack their own fans' websites. Maybe Wozniak wasn't all about making money, but Jobs and the others left steering the ship certainly are.
You are equating profit motive with attempt to monopolize. All corporations want profit; that's why they exist. If they don't they are called "non-profit organizations", not corporations. There's nothing wrong with being a non-profit, but that's not what Apple is, and I'm sure their shareholders are very happy about that.
Apple may have the largest market share of the music downloads, but there is no evidence to support that they are a monopoly or are doing anything particular to try to become one. Oh, right, they make a good product that lot's of people want to use! Worse still, they advertise to help their product seem hip!!! That must be illegal!
Have you noticed that, althought Apple's own operating system owes a lot to the open source movement, and the thousands of developers whose code they use for free, you and I still cannot run iTunes on our Linux desktop to sync an iPod? No money in it for them...
How do you know they aren't working on a Linux version of iTunes right now? And are you saying they should do it even if they loose money?
Since you've clearly forgotten, Apple has contributed enormously to the Open Source movement. They were the first large corportation to publicly embrace Open Source. Apple has contributed huge amounts of work to Open Source projects such as gcc, OpenPlay, and others. The Linux community benefited from their porting Linux to PowerPC (MkLinux).
It's time some people took off the rose coloured hippy glasses and realised that Apple is just another wannabe monopolist who've (luckily for us) simply been curtailed by an unfortunate event perpetrated by the current software monopolist.
It's about time the parent took off the rose coloured hippy glasses and realised that there's nothing wrong with a corporation pursuing profit by producing and advertising good products. There is no comparison between that and attempt established monopolies to squeeze others out of the market by stealing their technology (ie: Stacker), conspiring to divide up the market (ie: Quicktime), and deliberately making competing products stop working with your monopoly products (DrDOS).
I'd like to know what the moderators who modded the parent up were thinking.
What sort of fucking moron writes something that preposterous.
On Slashdot even comments like this modded up when it's supporting Apple. I think that says something.
To MS' credit, when they steal an idea, they at least offer to buy off the inventor, ESPECIALLY if the inventor is a small to midsized firm.
Granted, if you turn down the offer, MS is probably going to destroy you, but they do offer to compensate the inventor first.
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or Mepis or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. This is an article about email disclaimers. The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx, because "is teh free".
Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
Here's that drive-by advocacy and FUD in motion: twitter goes on about some topic and then drops the usual "oh and M$ is teh evil" because "WMP phones home" or some such. Called on his FUD, he then claims that WMP stores every song and movie you've ever played in a file, somewhere. Pressed further, he just sort of slithers out of sight, his FUD-spreading complete. This is not about some Microsoft technology that nobody likes anyway; it's about lying for the sake of lying. Way too many of his posts are exactly like this one.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one. Or this one.
Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.
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