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Why Apple Denied the Google Latitude App
awyeah writes "A recently revealed Apple patent looks remarkably similar to the functionality of Google Latitude, which Apple relegated to WebApp status earlier this year. Obviously if Apple is working on their own version of Google Latitude (or owns the IP rights to this functionality), they'd be hesitant to put an app with the same functionality on their devices from another company."
Has there been a single good thing to come out of software patents? It seems like every single day there is a story posted about a patent that has clear prior art or is trivial and doesn't innovate or invent anything. The US needs to stop software patents if they want to let technology innovate.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
yes. Many people just don't know this about Apple. In the mid to late 80's Apple was well known for being extremely obtuse about low level programming information and tools for the Mac. Not only did they refuse to give out development tools for free, but they also refused to allow others to have enough information to develop their own .. at any price.
Apple has been asshats since the first Mac, but somehow in the 90's they managed to turn popular opinion around while remaining asshats.
"His name was James Damore."
Steve Jobs doesn't "hate" using open source. For example, he tried to keep the Objective-C extensions to GCC closed source in violation of the GPL; it took a lot of legal saber rattling by GNU to get him to comply.
Apple is somewhat better now than they were 20 years ago, but they are still taking much more from the open source community than they are giving back. Without FOSS, Apple would be out of business; but even if all of Apple's contributions to FOSS disappeared overnight, people would hardly notice.