Apple Sues HTC Over iPhone Patents

Posted by Ryan Kearney on March 2, 2010 Leave a commentView Comments Go to comments
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Apple just never knows when to stop. Recently, Apple has filed a lawsuit at HTC over iPhone patents used by HTC. But wait, it gets better. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, was quoted as saying

We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.

I actually find this to be quite ironic. Lets take a moment to go back in time and look at Apple’s OS9

Now, I can’t be the only one who says wow, that looks pretty bad. Anyone who used a Mac 10 years ago remembers this awful looking operating system, brought to you by Apple.

Now, let’s take a look at what Apple’s OSX looks like.

Now that’s quite an improvement. Transparency, usable dock, and more eye candy than a sports illustrated wall calendar. What happened in between OS9 and OSX? What did Apple do to greatly increase the usability of their operating system? I’ll tell you what they did, they stole technology from BSD.

That’s right, Steve Jobs said competitors should make their own technology, not steal others. It’s funny because without BSD, Apple would still look like OS9. BSD was created some time ago, before OSX. Apple clearly isn’t capable of making a usable operating system on their own, so they used BSD for the core of their operating system, then just added shiny buttons to make it look nice.

But wait, there’s more. Steve Jobs was also quoted as saying

Good artists copy great artists steal

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Does Steve Jobs think he’s above the law?

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  • Pete

    Agreed, Apple does steal great technology and tweak it for their own purposes. The word steal used in this context means acquiring companies or divisions of companies that make great stuff, not steal as in take and pay no money for. Other companies see an idea or concept that Apple (or a company owned by Apple) has come up with, then make it slightly different and market it as their own. This is what Steve Jobs is complaining about.

    As for BSD, Apple only used the virtual file system, network stack, and components of its userspace. BSD did not have all the eye candy associated with OS X.

    The version of BSD that was used by Apple was FreeBSD, ie open-source and free to use. So this was not really stealing. Apple does not deny that some code was borrowed from BSD. So I think you’ll find that Apple and Steve Jobs are not guilty, your honour.

  • Pete

    Actually, there is one exception to this. The OS that powered the Apple Lisa was heavily based on work done by Xerox PARC. However, by the time the first Macintosh computer was released, the System Software the Mac ran was different enough to Xerox’s to be called Apple’s own work. I suggest digging into the history of Microsoft and Windows to see the kind of treachery that happened there…

  • http://www.ryankearney.com Ryan Kearney

    Pete, you’re forgetting something. Aside from the fact that Apple uses much more than what you mentioned (i.e. the entire coreutils package), Microsoft never made statements that “competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

    The whole point of this article was to point out how ironic it is for Steve Jobs to sue a company because they copied their idea, then go ahead and publicly say that companies should create their own technology and not steal theirs.

    I don’t deny that Microsoft borrowed ideas from other companies. However Microsoft wasn’t smug about it.

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