alt Hacker NewsIt's not about fairness. It's about making bad actors like Apple pay to do their own bad work. If they chose to make open source software and actually make the world better we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
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Do you consider open-sourcing the software a necessary precondition for making the world better?
In other words, can a company make the world better by making proprietary software? In my opinion, that's obviously true. (Although I too dislike Apple specifically)
Your approach forces every company to redo the work, even the "good" ones. In fact, that probably makes the situation worse, because it raises the barrier to entry and forces companies to choose agressive and hostile business models in order to get that investment back. If a new "More Ethical Apple" could be started instantly with no software investment, we would have one, the users would be able to switch, and would directly benefit from this
> If they chose to make open source software and actually make the world better we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
You mean like they did with LLVM/Clang?
> The LLVM project started in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, under the direction of Vikram Adve and Chris Lattner. LLVM was originally developed as a research infrastructure to investigate dynamic compilation techniques for static and dynamic programming languages. LLVM was released under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License,[3] a permissive free software licence. In 2005, Apple Inc. hired Lattner and formed a team to work on the LLVM system for various uses within Apple's development systems.[26] LLVM has been an integral part of Apple's Xcode development tools for macOS and iOS since Xcode 4 in 2011.[27]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM#History