Does apple have a legitimate defense against people ripping off it's innovations like this?
If it were an "innovation" and they filed a patent, yes, then they have a defense.
We'll have to see whether they actually did file a patent and whether it stands up. You see, while Mac users are easily vowed by this sort of thing, these kinds of window management hacks have been around for a long time.
Apple deserve much praise for their recent work on OS X in my opinion. Simply duplicating work that they've invested time, money and effort in research and development.
Given how much Apple copied from other people, I think anything they give back is only fair.
It is entirely predictable that anything Apple does will be copied by some open source project. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Personally, I think people need Expose about as much as they need a BSOD. It's just another example of how messed up window management on Mac/Windows-style desktops really is. Expose is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic--it fails to address the underlying problems.
Don't want to sound like flamebait, but it seems to me like lots of OSS projects just copy things that others (Apple, even MS) invented. This, the whole Windows L&F, Mono.
Of course, OSS projects copy a lot. What's wrong with that? Is it only OK to copy if you make proprietary software? Apple's and Microsoft's entire business is built on copying others, and neither Apple nor Microsoft have come up with a lot that's original.
Of course, most of the stuff that OSS copies is superficial fluff; the software architecture underlying OSS is rather different from Apple and Microsoft. And both Apple and Microsoft copied only the superficial appearance of the GUIs and IDEs they were aping.
In the case of Apple and Microsoft, that's a real problem because the software architecture they developed in-house was so much worse than what they copied. Xerox's GUIs, the basis for both Apple's and Microsoft's systems, actually had an execellent architectural foundation and programming language support And NeXT/Apple's IDE is a poor copy of Smalltalks, while Visual C++ is a poor copy of various other research IDEs at the time: they look somewhat similar, but they still (to this day) do so much less.
There isn't enough copying going on. Apple and Microsoft are arrogant and incompetent when it comes to software architecture and they'll rather do a poor job in house than copy someone else. They should copy more. OSS should also copy more: graphic designs and superficial UI concepts from Apple and Microsoft, but for deeper architectural issues, OSS should look more at the research literature since Apple and Microsoft are poor examples to copy from.
Like any craft, software gets better by taking the best ideas from other systems and then reimplementing them. We should do more of that, not less. Apple and Microsoft, are you listening?
The obvious solution is to remap all the topographic detail using SVG so that you end up with a seamless map showing the same detail level, down to villages and rivers, that has the whole oblast in one snapshot, zoomable down to the detail you need to see roads, railroads, and national parks.
If you look around the web, you will find that there are XML-based GIS formats. Check for OpenGIS and GML. But they are not just SVG--the requirements for GIS are more complex, both in terms of storage layout and in the need for the representation of non-geometric attributes and content in GIS systems.
It has NOTHING to do with SVG, Flash, or Web standards.
Is that why Microsoft calls it a "Flash killer"? Is that why it is 90%, but not 100%, identical to SVG?
Of course it has something to do with SVG, Flash, and web standards.
If you need to compare it to something, compare it to 'Quartz' - and I don't see people jumping on Apple for replacing SVG or Flash by using the PDF based Quartz engine.
That's because it doesn't matter what Apple does--they don't have enough marketshare. Furthermore, it would be pointless to tell Apple that Quartz is a bad design because they would never in a million years listen anyway--they are way too arrogant.
Everyone thought it was great stop forward in UI rendering models when Apple did this with Quartz, so how is Microsoft evil in developing their own rendering engine as well?
No, not "everyone" thought it was great. The usual Apple cheering squad thought it was great. But they would think it was great if Apple shipped severed cow heads on sticks and called them computers.
It's not even that supporting something like SVG in the display server is itself such a horrible idea--for a limited range of applications. But if you are going to do stored vector graphics in the server, either pick a standard format (100% SVG) or pick a decently designed format (PDF does not qualify). True to form, Microsoft and Apple got it both wrong, though in different ways.
Of course. But the human part might be offended or disturbed by the fact that the engineers are making plans in case of his/her demise. And the usual situation for "dead man switches" to operate is probably when the human operator is distracted or careless, rather than dead.
Better be careful with that language. Perhaps it should be cause the "non-responsive operator detection circuitry".
This looks like Microsoft's traditional embrace-and-extend approach. Well, except they are making even less of a pretense of "extending" it than before--they just mostly pretend SVG doesn't exist.
The question is: given Microsoft's patent claims on the Microsoft Office XML file formats, will they try to patent the WML formats as well?
Seems to me the terminology is descriptive and easily understood. Why should the use of slavery as a semi-descriptive term for a particular technology be offensive?
We also have "dead man switches", "sacrificial electrode", "vampire taps", and "kill switches", and a lot of other terms in technology that refer to things that, when they happen between humans, are unacceptable. It seems to me that the use of such terms to describe the relationship between inanimate objects or even non-human animals does not mean endorsing those behaviors for humans.
If you want your scientific papers to be archived, publish them on Arxiv (search on Google). Arxiv is replicated to multiple sites, backed up, archival, and does the right things with versions and changes.
Oh, one more thing: X11 applications fall back on local files (in your home directory, then in system directories) for their preferences if something is missing from the display's resource database. So, you get the best of both worlds. Gnome and KDE could do the same thing, but they simply seem to be lacking the display-based mechanisms. Well, maybe in another few years...
But is this not as it should be ? It surely is an inconvenience in an Linux/Unix workstation-only environment, but what about using it via an X-server on Windows, Mac, Thin Clients/xterms?
No, it's not an inconvenience at all, and the traditional X11 mechanisms were designed specifically to handle those cases as well (we have had thin X11 displays since the 1980's--low-end RISC machines with less than a megabyte of RAM--try that with WinCE or QtE).
What happens in a correctly set up X11 desktop environment is that preferences are set for the display by remote applications and other applications retrieve preferences from the display. That way, even if you run clients on dozens of different machines, they all get a consistent view of the desktop preferences. That is, they all use the fonts you have selected, they all use the colors you have selected, etc. In different words, there is a resource database in the X11 server, and each application shares it. Initially, it is loaded with programs like "xrdb".
If you take the approach of putting preferences "in the home directory" or "in the registry", then different applications connecting from different machines will all get the preferences stored in their own local disks. Furthermore, they won't adapt to the display's characteristics--traditionally, people choose different fonts and colors depending on the display they are on--something that "modern" X11 desktops also don't exactly make easy.
They have no brains and no sex--they just release their gametes into the water (come to think of it, that may be true for the average/.er as well). Do you want to live hundreds of years like that?
Brings to mind...
Methuselah lived nine hundred years But who calls that livin' When no gal will give in To no man what's nine hundred years
Sure there is such a guarantee, at least in the long term: if people refuse to work for companies that screw their customers, then companies that screw their customers simply can't make it.
Perhaps you forgot about the compromise of kernel development servers and the Debian website?
Yes, and I bet the Debian developers were shaking in their boots that someone was going to steal the Debian source code, right?
Microsoft's concerns regarding source code are likely less about preventing someone from SEEING it (you can pay them money to look at code) and more about modifiying it.
Microsoft has said again and again that they consider the closed source nature of their code itself highly valuable. Whether that's a marketing gimmick or actually the truth is another question, but it seems to be working. And, no, you can't get all of Microsoft's code.
If they were actually concerned about an intruder modifying the code, it would only be a further admission that their code maintenance practices leave a lot to be desired. But, then, we suspected that already.
Open Source is a wonderful thing -- but it isn't a silver bullet.
No, it's not a silver bullet, but at least it's a bullet. Microsoft is shooting with blanks.
The article probably gets it wrong. True Smartcards are almost useless for remote access at this point because there are few readers deployed in the field. At best, you can use them with specially equipped laptops, but even that is a hassle.
Microsoft, like most other large companies, almost certainly uses something like RSA's SecurID token or some challenge/response thing, and those things are quite a bit more expensive. The reason why companies use them is because they work with any web browser or ssh client--no reader required.
The Canadians are quick learners: in order to make behavior X illegal, you find a really disreputable behavior Y and associate the two. The US legal system has traditionally used terrorism for this trick, although child pornography has been used as well. Canada seems to be using child pornography for the same purpose.
The guy should be charged with obtaining child pornography and traffic violations. Using open access points, however, should not be illegal: it's far too easy to do accidentally.
But the take away message is that for all intents and purposes, XFree86 is X.
No, it isn't. X is a protocol and a standard, XFree86 is an implementation. What has happened is that the developers of XFree86 have become so influential that they, rather than the X consortium, set the agenda. But the X standard is, and continues to be, implemented by many different vendors and projects. It would be a sad day when X became synonymous with the XFree86 implementation.
Robert Stallman recently published a treatise entitled "The X Window's Trap" on his GNU.org personal homepage.
Stallman (that's Richard Stallman) in that article makes a point about the X Consortium's licensing policies. The X Consortium, in fact, took a position similar to Microsoft: "open source is good only if we can take the source and make it proprietary whenever we like". That's what Stallman disagrees with.
We can't say "Fuck Bill Gates" in one breath and then "I love X" in the other and remain morally sound and forthwith.
You are right if by "X", you mean "the X Consortium". But the X Consortium has been pretty widely disliked in the open source community for a long time for just that reason.
X11 itself, however, is an open network protocol. Stallman doesn't have any objections to open network protocols.
The selection mechanism is a different mechanism from copy-and-paste.
Even if you truly believe in selection/middle-mouse, you have to admit that it should at least be *possible* to configure X to use a universal Alt-C/Alt-P.
X just handles the graphics and windows--it has no more control over what applications do than a Postscript printer does.
How applications handle selections and copy-and-paste is entirely up to the application programmer and toolkit.
And why should we follow Windows there? Personally, I think copy-and-paste is evil and should be eliminated entirely. X applications should have consistent support for selections, and they actually used to be fairly consistent. But, then, people like you came around and wanted to put all that Windows "goodness" on top of X, and that's why we have a mess now: some X applications try to be more Windows-like than Windows, and others are X traditionalists. Ultimately, it's up to you which ones you pick--no Bill G. is going to decide for you on X.
Note that network transparency is really mostly about conventions and standards for applications running on different hosts.
VNC doesn't try to address that issue at all. And, in fact, GDI+ and Quartz can be trivially used as remote display engines, but neither their toolkits nor their applications have any clue how to behave properly.
Unfortunately, Gnome and KDE are eroding network transparency in X11. For example, they use some of their own preferences files, accessed via the file system, which means that preferences come from the remote machine, not the desktop. I think Gnome is trying to address this, I'm not sure about KDE.
I mean, X is good, no doubt, but it shows its age.
X11 is not showing its age at all--if you started from scratch today and did a good job at designing a window system with the functionalityi of X11, what you would end up with would look pretty much like X11 anyway.
Systems like Y or Berlin seem attractive because they are toys; sooner or later, they have to address the same issues X11 addresses and then they become similarly complex. GDI+ and Quartz don't even quite try to solve the hard problems or defining standards--their developers just hack until it looks good.
X11 is considerably slower at adopting new features than other systems. That's because X11 is not a piece of software, it's a standardized protocol. Microsoft or Apple can just go off hacking GDI+ or Quartz, but for X11, people sit down, try a bunch of ideas, then get together, hash out their experiences, write up a standard, and then every X server vendor and author goes back and actually implements it for real.
Transparent windows, more often than not, only show the underlying wallpaper and not the interlaying windows.
X11 doesn't have transparent windows yet, period. What you are seeing is a client-side emulation. X11 is getting transparent windows as part of RENDER, and those will work correctly (even though they are actually not all that useful other than for eye candy).
Often, X just locks under load.
That makes about as much sense as saying "often, HTML just locks under load". X is a protocol. Maybe your server running on your graphics card has a bug and "locks under load", but that's a problem with the implementation you are using. There are dozens of implementations of the X protocol by now.
VNC doesn't work at the individual application level; this does. That makes an enormous difference.
You can get some idea of how this will work in XEmacs (which has multi-display support and can be moved from the console). There is also the xmove server, which already implements this functionality via a proxy.
It's amazing that this has taken so long. The members of the X Consortium have really been sitting on their hands: this functionality was intended to be in X11 since pretty much the beginning.
No matter how they got hired, they work for the company, they represent it, and they have a choice in the matter. If the company turns out to behave badly, they can choose to quit right there and then and face the consequences, or they can choose to stay and face the consequences.
To give employees of bad companies a break just because they don't want to face the consequences of quitting just perpetuates a bad situation. Then, both those employees you pity and you yourself end up suffering. If people had the backbone of not working for companies that behave immorally (or even illegally), then those companies would go out of business and be replaced with ones that were well-behaved.
There is no such thing as an "X desktop", just like there is no such thing as a "GDI+ desktop" or a "PDF desktop". X is a low-level protocol.
Whether a desktop based on X is easy or difficult to learn depends entirely on the desktop. Something like Ion or CDE, can be frustrating, unintuitive, and complex to novices. OTOH, your local ATM, which may be running X as well, probably is so easy to learn that you don't even think of it as "learning".
The company in question claims that they didn't send the spam. From their point of view, they just got death threats without having done anything, just because someone else used their name.
Whether the company should have known that those threats were empty or whether they actually should have been taken seriously is really impossible to tell from the press info. That's what we have courts for to figure out.
Slashdot Mirror
Does apple have a legitimate defense against people ripping off it's innovations like this?
If it were an "innovation" and they filed a patent, yes, then they have a defense.
We'll have to see whether they actually did file a patent and whether it stands up. You see, while Mac users are easily vowed by this sort of thing, these kinds of window management hacks have been around for a long time.
Apple deserve much praise for their recent work on OS X in my opinion. Simply duplicating work that they've invested time, money and effort in research and development.
Given how much Apple copied from other people, I think anything they give back is only fair.
It is entirely predictable that anything Apple does will be copied by some open source project. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Personally, I think people need Expose about as much as they need a BSOD. It's just another example of how messed up window management on Mac/Windows-style desktops really is. Expose is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic--it fails to address the underlying problems.
Don't want to sound like flamebait, but it seems to me like lots of OSS projects just copy things that others (Apple, even MS) invented. This, the whole Windows L&F, Mono.
Of course, OSS projects copy a lot. What's wrong with that? Is it only OK to copy if you make proprietary software? Apple's and Microsoft's entire business is built on copying others, and neither Apple nor Microsoft have come up with a lot that's original.
Of course, most of the stuff that OSS copies is superficial fluff; the software architecture underlying OSS is rather different from Apple and Microsoft. And both Apple and Microsoft copied only the superficial appearance of the GUIs and IDEs they were aping.
In the case of Apple and Microsoft, that's a real problem because the software architecture they developed in-house was so much worse than what they copied. Xerox's GUIs, the basis for both Apple's and Microsoft's systems, actually had an execellent architectural foundation and programming language support And NeXT/Apple's IDE is a poor copy of Smalltalks, while Visual C++ is a poor copy of various other research IDEs at the time: they look somewhat similar, but they still (to this day) do so much less.
There isn't enough copying going on. Apple and Microsoft are arrogant and incompetent when it comes to software architecture and they'll rather do a poor job in house than copy someone else. They should copy more. OSS should also copy more: graphic designs and superficial UI concepts from Apple and Microsoft, but for deeper architectural issues, OSS should look more at the research literature since Apple and Microsoft are poor examples to copy from.
Like any craft, software gets better by taking the best ideas from other systems and then reimplementing them. We should do more of that, not less. Apple and Microsoft, are you listening?
The obvious solution is to remap all the topographic detail using SVG so that you end up with a seamless map showing the same detail level, down to villages and rivers, that has the whole oblast in one snapshot, zoomable down to the detail you need to see roads, railroads, and national parks.
If you look around the web, you will find that there are XML-based GIS formats. Check for OpenGIS and GML. But they are not just SVG--the requirements for GIS are more complex, both in terms of storage layout and in the need for the representation of non-geometric attributes and content in GIS systems.
It has NOTHING to do with SVG, Flash, or Web standards.
Is that why Microsoft calls it a "Flash killer"? Is that why it is 90%, but not 100%, identical to SVG?
Of course it has something to do with SVG, Flash, and web standards.
If you need to compare it to something, compare it to 'Quartz' - and I don't see people jumping on Apple for replacing SVG or Flash by using the PDF based Quartz engine.
That's because it doesn't matter what Apple does--they don't have enough marketshare. Furthermore, it would be pointless to tell Apple that Quartz is a bad design because they would never in a million years listen anyway--they are way too arrogant.
Everyone thought it was great stop forward in UI rendering models when Apple did this with Quartz, so how is Microsoft evil in developing their own rendering engine as well?
No, not "everyone" thought it was great. The usual Apple cheering squad thought it was great. But they would think it was great if Apple shipped severed cow heads on sticks and called them computers.
It's not even that supporting something like SVG in the display server is itself such a horrible idea--for a limited range of applications. But if you are going to do stored vector graphics in the server, either pick a standard format (100% SVG) or pick a decently designed format (PDF does not qualify). True to form, Microsoft and Apple got it both wrong, though in different ways.
Of course. But the human part might be offended or disturbed by the fact that the engineers are making plans in case of his/her demise. And the usual situation for "dead man switches" to operate is probably when the human operator is distracted or careless, rather than dead.
Better be careful with that language. Perhaps it should be cause the "non-responsive operator detection circuitry".
This looks like Microsoft's traditional embrace-and-extend approach. Well, except they are making even less of a pretense of "extending" it than before--they just mostly pretend SVG doesn't exist.
The question is: given Microsoft's patent claims on the Microsoft Office XML file formats, will they try to patent the WML formats as well?
Seems to me the terminology is descriptive and easily understood. Why should the use of slavery as a semi-descriptive term for a particular technology be offensive?
We also have "dead man switches", "sacrificial electrode", "vampire taps", and "kill switches", and a lot of other terms in technology that refer to things that, when they happen between humans, are unacceptable. It seems to me that the use of such terms to describe the relationship between inanimate objects or even non-human animals does not mean endorsing those behaviors for humans.
If you want your scientific papers to be archived, publish them on Arxiv (search on Google). Arxiv is replicated to multiple sites, backed up, archival, and does the right things with versions and changes.
Oh, one more thing: X11 applications fall back on local files (in your home directory, then in system directories) for their preferences if something is missing from the display's resource database. So, you get the best of both worlds. Gnome and KDE could do the same thing, but they simply seem to be lacking the display-based mechanisms. Well, maybe in another few years...
But is this not as it should be ? It surely is an inconvenience in an Linux/Unix workstation-only environment, but what about using it via an X-server on Windows, Mac, Thin Clients/xterms?
No, it's not an inconvenience at all, and the traditional X11 mechanisms were designed specifically to handle those cases as well (we have had thin X11 displays since the 1980's--low-end RISC machines with less than a megabyte of RAM--try that with WinCE or QtE).
What happens in a correctly set up X11 desktop environment is that preferences are set for the display by remote applications and other applications retrieve preferences from the display. That way, even if you run clients on dozens of different machines, they all get a consistent view of the desktop preferences. That is, they all use the fonts you have selected, they all use the colors you have selected, etc. In different words, there is a resource database in the X11 server, and each application shares it. Initially, it is loaded with programs like "xrdb".
If you take the approach of putting preferences "in the home directory" or "in the registry", then different applications connecting from different machines will all get the preferences stored in their own local disks. Furthermore, they won't adapt to the display's characteristics--traditionally, people choose different fonts and colors depending on the display they are on--something that "modern" X11 desktops also don't exactly make easy.
Brings to mind...
Sure there is such a guarantee, at least in the long term: if people refuse to work for companies that screw their customers, then companies that screw their customers simply can't make it.
Perhaps you forgot about the compromise of kernel development servers and the Debian website?
Yes, and I bet the Debian developers were shaking in their boots that someone was going to steal the Debian source code, right?
Microsoft's concerns regarding source code are likely less about preventing someone from SEEING it (you can pay them money to look at code) and more about modifiying it.
Microsoft has said again and again that they consider the closed source nature of their code itself highly valuable. Whether that's a marketing gimmick or actually the truth is another question, but it seems to be working. And, no, you can't get all of Microsoft's code.
If they were actually concerned about an intruder modifying the code, it would only be a further admission that their code maintenance practices leave a lot to be desired. But, then, we suspected that already.
Open Source is a wonderful thing -- but it isn't a silver bullet.
No, it's not a silver bullet, but at least it's a bullet. Microsoft is shooting with blanks.
The article probably gets it wrong. True Smartcards are almost useless for remote access at this point because there are few readers deployed in the field. At best, you can use them with specially equipped laptops, but even that is a hassle.
Microsoft, like most other large companies, almost certainly uses something like RSA's SecurID token or some challenge/response thing, and those things are quite a bit more expensive. The reason why companies use them is because they work with any web browser or ssh client--no reader required.
The Canadians are quick learners: in order to make behavior X illegal, you find a really disreputable behavior Y and associate the two. The US legal system has traditionally used terrorism for this trick, although child pornography has been used as well. Canada seems to be using child pornography for the same purpose.
The guy should be charged with obtaining child pornography and traffic violations. Using open access points, however, should not be illegal: it's far too easy to do accidentally.
But the take away message is that for all intents and purposes, XFree86 is X.
No, it isn't. X is a protocol and a standard, XFree86 is an implementation. What has happened is that the developers of XFree86 have become so influential that they, rather than the X consortium, set the agenda. But the X standard is, and continues to be, implemented by many different vendors and projects. It would be a sad day when X became synonymous with the XFree86 implementation.
Robert Stallman recently published a treatise entitled "The X Window's Trap" on his GNU.org personal homepage.
Stallman (that's Richard Stallman) in that article makes a point about the X Consortium's licensing policies. The X Consortium, in fact, took a position similar to Microsoft: "open source is good only if we can take the source and make it proprietary whenever we like". That's what Stallman disagrees with.
We can't say "Fuck Bill Gates" in one breath and then "I love X" in the other and remain morally sound and forthwith.
You are right if by "X", you mean "the X Consortium". But the X Consortium has been pretty widely disliked in the open source community for a long time for just that reason.
X11 itself, however, is an open network protocol. Stallman doesn't have any objections to open network protocols.
The selection mechanism is a different mechanism from copy-and-paste.
Even if you truly believe in selection/middle-mouse, you have to admit that it should at least be *possible* to configure X to use a universal Alt-C/Alt-P.
X just handles the graphics and windows--it has no more control over what applications do than a Postscript printer does.
How applications handle selections and copy-and-paste is entirely up to the application programmer and toolkit.
And why should we follow Windows there? Personally, I think copy-and-paste is evil and should be eliminated entirely. X applications should have consistent support for selections, and they actually used to be fairly consistent. But, then, people like you came around and wanted to put all that Windows "goodness" on top of X, and that's why we have a mess now: some X applications try to be more Windows-like than Windows, and others are X traditionalists. Ultimately, it's up to you which ones you pick--no Bill G. is going to decide for you on X.
Note that network transparency is really mostly about conventions and standards for applications running on different hosts.
VNC doesn't try to address that issue at all. And, in fact, GDI+ and Quartz can be trivially used as remote display engines, but neither their toolkits nor their applications have any clue how to behave properly.
Unfortunately, Gnome and KDE are eroding network transparency in X11. For example, they use some of their own preferences files, accessed via the file system, which means that preferences come from the remote machine, not the desktop. I think Gnome is trying to address this, I'm not sure about KDE.
I mean, X is good, no doubt, but it shows its age.
X11 is not showing its age at all--if you started from scratch today and did a good job at designing a window system with the functionalityi of X11, what you would end up with would look pretty much like X11 anyway.
Systems like Y or Berlin seem attractive because they are toys; sooner or later, they have to address the same issues X11 addresses and then they become similarly complex. GDI+ and Quartz don't even quite try to solve the hard problems or defining standards--their developers just hack until it looks good.
X11 is considerably slower at adopting new features than other systems. That's because X11 is not a piece of software, it's a standardized protocol. Microsoft or Apple can just go off hacking GDI+ or Quartz, but for X11, people sit down, try a bunch of ideas, then get together, hash out their experiences, write up a standard, and then every X server vendor and author goes back and actually implements it for real.
Transparent windows, more often than not, only show the underlying wallpaper and not the interlaying windows.
X11 doesn't have transparent windows yet, period. What you are seeing is a client-side emulation. X11 is getting transparent windows as part of RENDER, and those will work correctly (even though they are actually not all that useful other than for eye candy).
Often, X just locks under load.
That makes about as much sense as saying "often, HTML just locks under load". X is a protocol. Maybe your server running on your graphics card has a bug and "locks under load", but that's a problem with the implementation you are using. There are dozens of implementations of the X protocol by now.
VNC doesn't work at the individual application level; this does. That makes an enormous difference.
You can get some idea of how this will work in XEmacs (which has multi-display support and can be moved from the console). There is also the xmove server, which already implements this functionality via a proxy.
It's amazing that this has taken so long. The members of the X Consortium have really been sitting on their hands: this functionality was intended to be in X11 since pretty much the beginning.
No matter how they got hired, they work for the company, they represent it, and they have a choice in the matter. If the company turns out to behave badly, they can choose to quit right there and then and face the consequences, or they can choose to stay and face the consequences.
To give employees of bad companies a break just because they don't want to face the consequences of quitting just perpetuates a bad situation. Then, both those employees you pity and you yourself end up suffering. If people had the backbone of not working for companies that behave immorally (or even illegally), then those companies would go out of business and be replaced with ones that were well-behaved.
There is no such thing as an "X desktop", just like there is no such thing as a "GDI+ desktop" or a "PDF desktop". X is a low-level protocol.
Whether a desktop based on X is easy or difficult to learn depends entirely on the desktop. Something like Ion or CDE, can be frustrating, unintuitive, and complex to novices. OTOH, your local ATM, which may be running X as well, probably is so easy to learn that you don't even think of it as "learning".
The company in question claims that they didn't send the spam. From their point of view, they just got death threats without having done anything, just because someone else used their name.
Whether the company should have known that those threats were empty or whether they actually should have been taken seriously is really impossible to tell from the press info. That's what we have courts for to figure out.