> It's not black and white, but cloning a product is just not nice.
Not only is it perfectly fine, it's the only way for competitive markets to function.
Copyright, patent, and trademark laws demarcate the boundaries within which we aim to guarantee enough protection to incentivize investment in truly unique innovations, but outside of those boundaries, we want markets converge to common product standards and establish category-wide conventions. That enables continuous marginal innovation without each entrant having to reinvent the wheel from scratch every time.
I'm not sure anyone, Apple included, is better off today because they managed to shut down GEM and ended up killing Digital Research. I'm not sure anyone, AT&T included, would be better off today if the BSD and GNU projects and Linus Torvalds had never aimed to create clones of Unix.
Creating FOSS clones of commercial products is where much of the foundational modern software came from, and forking existing projects to add your own features is an essential element of FOSS software.
You're naturally free to eschew this project for the reasons you cite, but I don't think your opinion establishes good general principles. Markets, technology, and society as
a whole function precisely because people do copy what works from each other and add then add their own innovations incrementally.
Not only is it perfectly fine, it's the only way for competitive markets to function.
Copyright, patent, and trademark laws demarcate the boundaries within which we aim to guarantee enough protection to incentivize investment in truly unique innovations, but outside of those boundaries, we want markets converge to common product standards and establish category-wide conventions. That enables continuous marginal innovation without each entrant having to reinvent the wheel from scratch every time.
I'm not sure anyone, Apple included, is better off today because they managed to shut down GEM and ended up killing Digital Research. I'm not sure anyone, AT&T included, would be better off today if the BSD and GNU projects and Linus Torvalds had never aimed to create clones of Unix.
Creating FOSS clones of commercial products is where much of the foundational modern software came from, and forking existing projects to add your own features is an essential element of FOSS software.
You're naturally free to eschew this project for the reasons you cite, but I don't think your opinion establishes good general principles. Markets, technology, and society as a whole function precisely because people do copy what works from each other and add then add their own innovations incrementally.