Comment Re: Copyright? (Score 1) 154
Show me a "new idea" in software and I'll show you some no-account who claims he "thought of it first" but didn't have the motivation or skills, either to implement it right, or to successfully bring it to market.
Sure there are occasional examples of some freeware widget being copied and made into part of the OS, but more often than that, they just buy the relevant IP from the guy who created it. However if you think Apple is the only company to ever reimplement a "good idea" independently, without the blessing of some "inventor of the idea," then you're delusional and just have an axe to grind with Apple on some holy-war grounds.
Let me guess, you think Apple "stole" the desktop metaphor, mouse, etc. from Xerox PARC... but Microsoft was just using an obvious evolutionary idea when they suddenly developed Windows after examining the Mac prototypes they were given.
Apple (and Jobs) are no saints. But they've been on both sides of those battles, and are no worse than any other tech firm when it comes to originality. There are just not that many whole-cloth brand new ideas in our industry! The best things are refinements of other things. Think about it--Apple didn't invent MP3 players, and Microsoft didn't invent CP/M. In both cases, the concept of something crappy was taken, improved upon, and released as something less crappy (iPod, and MS-DOS).