Lies at the Root of the Apple Tree: Stolen Software

Jul 7, 2011 by Editor

Back in 1996 PBS aired a documentary called “Triumph of the Nerds” with a younger Steve Jobs factually stating, “We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” Fast forward to 2011 and it’s a very different Steve Jobs we see today. The present day Jobs is filing patent lawsuits against anyone and everyone he can and is ruthlessly patenting the ideas of others. In fact Apple is now the most litigous company in history more than beating Microsoft.

For Part 2 in the series I’m going to break down just a few of the more recent software-based things that Apple claims it created by listing the actual innovator thus giving the true inventor the credit Apple refuses to give anyone. Now Apple has been pulling this for over two decades and I’ll get to the older stuff down the road. For now we’re only looking back up to 5 years.

The App Store

In 2008 Steve Jobs took the stage and debuted the Apple App Store for the iPhone. He waxed poetic about how revolutionary the mere concept was and how Apple, as always, is on the cutting edge.

Of course what Jobs forgot to mention was that Apple stole the idea for the App Store from the Linux community.

Four years before Apple “invented” the app store the Linux community had created and operated (yes, it was fully working and online back in 2004) the app store far more successfully.

The Synaptic Package Manager is a central location for the installation and management of applications and has been around since early 2004. In fact the entire Ubuntu (the foremost Linux operating system) App store has been online and active for over seven years and truth be told they do the “app store” far better than Apple. The Ubuntu Software Center and the One Music Store allows thousands of users to download, install, manage and sync songs, applications and just about anything else to any device you can imagine. Try doing that through the Apple App Store.

Finder Sidebar

Apple’s Finder Sidebar looks surprisingly like the Windows Navigation pane. Both sit on the left side providing hierarchical icons to navigate to other folders. The Mac OS X 10.3 Panther from four years ago was the first Apple product to feature the Finder Sidebar. That’s a full two years after Windows XP debuted with the technology.

Screen Sharing & Remote Access

Microsoft has offered Remote Desktop Connection for years ever since Windows XP but Apple was a little late to the party yet still managed to claim innovation over this very basic utility. Apple finally added this functionality to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard while embarassingly enough Microsoft actually provided a free Mac version of its popular Remote utility well before Apple was offering it.

FutureTap: Apple Now Calls It WhereTo?

Apple has stolen and patented quite a few third-party applications from its app store including the popular FutureTap created by Ortwin Gentz. Gentz himself noticed the patent application which became Apple’s WhereTo? application back in August. The patent application has a nearly identical graphic to FutureTap’s real working screen and lists FutureTap’s features almost exactly.

“Apparently, Apple starts patenting mobile app ideas—and one of those ideas is ours. We couldn’t believe what we saw and felt it can’t be true that someone else is filing a patent including a 1:1 copy of our start screen. We’re faced with a situation where we’ve to fear that our primary business partner is trying to “steal” our idea and design.” Gentz stated about the matter. Apple refuses to respond.

Wi-Fi Sync: Hardly an Apple Original

Apple told a developer that his software was insecure and cannot be put in its App store right after Steve Rea, an App Store representative called the young developer personally to tell him that the iPhone engineering team had looked at it and were quite impressed. Shortly afterward Apple copied it right down to the logo itself and released it as their own knowing full well this college student wouldn’t be able to afford an attorney.

The British newspaper, The Telegraph, explains it best:

Greg Hughes, a third year computer science student at the University of Birmingham, developed an application called “Wi-Fi Sync” and offered it to Apple’s App Store in May 2010. The app was designed to sync iTunes libraries with iPhones over a wireless wireless network rather than via a USB connector.

After the App Store rejected his submission Mr Hughes put his app up for sale on the Cydia store, a rival to the App Store which sells software for “jailbroken” iPhones – devices which have had the usage limitations imposed by Apple removed. The app, priced at $9.99 (£6.07), has become one of Cydia’s top products, selling more than 50,000 copies since its release.

But this Monday, Apple unveiled its new iPhone operating system, iOS 5, with an inbuilt feature also called Wi-Fi Sync, which carries out the same wireless syncing function. It also has a very similar logo [see image above].

Mr Hughes told The Telegraph: “I was completely shocked. I’m in the middle of exams so the timing isn’t great.”

So there you go. Five more prime examples of how far Steve Jobs has been willing to go to get on top and stay on top. The best is still yet to come including a revelation about Apple’s most talked about “invention”. Stay tuned for part three!