The only reason I read the comments on this story was to figure out what the heck Microsoft could have been doing all this time. Microsoft has a bad reputation with regard to the quality of their code. But they have a really good reputation for shipping products. I also know some really smart people working at Microsoft - and I'm sure there are lots of others I don't know.

So I'm trying to figure out what all these smart people known for shipping products could have been doing all this time. The only thing that makes sense is a scenario like the one you described. In other words, that the management had some unrealistic requirement that they were unwilling to compromise. Porting mountains of existing code to .NET sounds exactly like one of the few things that could have bogged down so many smart people for so long. Maybe Microsoft finally is too big for their own good and they're collapsing under the weight of all the pointy haired bosses.

No. They are not. Your information is wrong. Check your sources.

We will be without a space observatory for at least 6 years before Icarus goes up. The Icarus program is fighting right now for funding that was cut do to the latest gulf war. Icarus also is fighting for funding that is now headed towards the vaporus human settlement on the moon and mars.

The loss of Hubble is a monumental loss of at least six years of cutting edge science and duplicated effort. Hubble proved the existence of black holes yet several million dollars of upgrade parts lie in storage in florida never to see the light of day, or space for that matter.

In short. What a waste.

Honestly, what did Apple really do to this guy? Sure, he has to return the SDK, but that just means that, in the future, he'll be unable to refer to it--if his code is well-documented (or, perhaps, when his code becomes well-documented between now and the time he returns the iSDK ;-)), then it won't be an issue.

As for the order to stop distributing, that shouldn't hurt too much either. In a couple of weeks, "a friend of his" could "write a similar thing". Or the source might "find its way onto a public server". Apple could have done a lot worse than a cease-and-desist style ultimatum, with the legions of lawyers at their command, so I think this represents a measure of compassion towards Mac developers.

As for those of you pre-flaming Apple for the possibility that Apple developers will use iCommune code in the potentially file-sharing-enabled "iTunes x", isn't that what Open Source and Free Software are supposed to be about?

I have slashdot as my homepage (have for a long time) and I've pretty much read every article on the front page since a year ago. I would like to break away from /. but I have this need to know every new gadget or program that comes up. I think I'll use rootprompt instead.