Posts by Tadz 3 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2011
The big difference, I'd guess, is that Mozilla was working on making a browser that would work with everything and in this case Google will probably deliberately take steps to make their apps non-backwards compatible--much like what MS did for decades. I think they'll ultimately find that it's a mistake.
I ran into it not long ago when I went to correct a broken link in an article. I couldn't figure out how to use it and this is the kind of thing I do for a living. It really is the worst WYSIWYG editor I've ever encountered. Knowing they dropped a bundle into making it is...very discouraging.
The reason Wikipedia is having a "long-term decline in active editors" is due to the fact that there are *far* more people out there policing others' work than there are people being productive. It's a lot easier to shred what others do and consider yourself an important contributor than it is to put time into doing things which others will tear apart. I'm not talking about unsupported or poor quality content or images which stretch the limits of "fair use" (or vandalized content). "Uncontributing" can be stunningly egregious: an example, taking someone else's image, cropping it, deleting the original and uploading the "new" image as their own. I'm not even starting in on what happens if you don't agree with what's been done.
It takes very little time to challenge what others have done and fast track the content out of existence; it's onerous and extremely time consuming trying to prevent contested material from being eliminated (and forget attempting to correct a situation like the highjacked image scenario described earlier).
I was very excited about Wikipedia initially and invested a lot of time in contributing in positive ways. Now at most I'll correct poor English, remove broken links or clean up poorly formatted details (references, etc.). It just got too exhausting doing more, and when it's clear the people spending the most time are doing so by wiping out others' work, honestly, it's pointless.
It appears to me from the comments that some readers are both missing the point and getting too picky about what constitutes copyright infringement. Apple, like a number of high profile tech companies--toss in Amazon and MS--has a well established record of being very aggressive with regard to copyright infringement, and they don't hesitate even when the issue isn't strictly breaking the law. They have not balked at suing (or threatening to) over conceptual issues more than once. I also didn't get the impression Hughes was suing Apple over this. Under the circumstances, it looks perfectly plausible that Apple got the idea for the app from Hughes' submission and it would be nice if they gave him credit for it. If the roles were reversed you can be sure Apple would be all over him.
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