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Cisco VP Explains Lawsuit Against Apple
Dekortage writes "The day after Apple announced its iPhone, Cisco sued over the name. Mark Chandler, Cisco's SVP and General Counsel, has posted an explanation of the suit on his blog: 'For the last few weeks, we have been in serious discussions with Apple over how the two companies could work together and share the iPhone trademark. ...I was surprised and disappointed when Apple decided to go ahead and announce their new product with our trademarked name without reaching an agreement. It was essentially the equivalent of "we're too busy."' What did Cisco want? '[We] wanted an open approach. We hoped our products could interoperate in the future.'" Another reader wrote to mention that already, Cisco's trademark might be in trouble in Europe.
It's intersting that my mac usage is also applicance-like. I plug it in, it works. Web, email, photos, music. For dev work, I run on either a separate box (using the mac as a terminal), or to a VM. As far as thrid party software on my mac, it has to be seriously well vetted: I don't want my appliance messed up - I spent too many years dealing with non-appliance linux distros and the decidedly non-appliance windows world to want to even screw around with any sysadmin shite on my "communication appliance".
When I get my iPhone, it won't be for 3rd party apps.
You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well I'm the only one here. Now laugh...that was funny...
That is not a defense. If there are equivalent open standard alternatives, why did they feel the need to create closed ones? Answer: Because they want to institute lock-in. It's just that simple.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You have in no way invalidated my point, and the person who modded me as a troll is a dumbfuck. If Cisco were actually interested in openness, then they would have simply published RFCs for the protocols they created and made them freely available to all. Instead, workalikes which are more or less equivalent (but are often not direct equivalents) have been developed.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>What complete and utter bullshit.
>> -DRM
> I'm not going to rehash the extensive comments from this story earlier today.
So what if their DRM isn't "very strong". I can't play my legally purcahsed music under Linux. Telling the judge that it's OK for you to rape someone because you were flaccid isn't going to hold up. If Apple doesn't want to do DRM, they shouldn't. They do do it, so they're evil. End of story.
>> -Proprietary hardware
> Such as? *crickets* Surely the fact that on installing Windows on a shiny Intel Mac, all of
> the drivers outside of the keyboard backlight are from other well-known vendors like
> Atheros, Intel, ATI, etc, should disprove THAT turd.
Those three manufacturers are some of the most widely known for proprietary drivers (and buggy hardware that their drivers don't even work around very well).
>> -Proprietary software
> And who isn't, other than Linux and BSD? They are the exceptions, not the rule. Windows, AIX,
> Solaris, BeOS, PalmOS, etc - you name it, it's most likely proprietary. At least Apple makes
> a good chunk of its base open, and has contributed other useful projects like WebKit and
> launchd.
WebKit was Open Source already. launchd is useless. Apple consistently avoids giving back to the community. With a lot of crying they will release some useless code just to get everyone to shut up.
They do take a lot though, and that's what they call a commitment to open source. I guess that's fine to market it that way (Samba is better than anything Apple could come up with), but it is misleading. Without Apple, all of the open source projects that OS X uses would still be doing fine. Apple needs them, not the other way around.
>> -Closed protocols
> Such as? Hell, even protocols they've pushed (like Rendezvous/Bonjour/ZeroConf) are standardized.
Oh yeah, it's really easy to buy music from iTunes with my standard-issue web browser. It's also very easy to build custom apps for the iPod, because Apple publishes an SDK! Oh wait, that's completely false.
>> -selected compatibility
> Again, who doesn't? I'm not even sure what you mean, unless you're upset you can't play a Divx on an iPod Video or something...
iRiver manages to do this, and their products are less expensive.
>> It's CEO is also know for pulling tantrums.
> Its CEO is known for having a VERY sharp idea of what he wants, and yes, being very difficult and arbitrary to get it sometimes. Those are not tantrums. Throwing a chair, that's a tamtrum.
Yes, Microsoft and Apple are both led by small children. You're allowed to hate MS and Apple, ya know.
My other car is first.