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That was the most retarded thing I've ever seen. OF COURSE Vista ripped of OSX. ALL OS's rip off of each other. That's like saying Ubuntu is an unoriginal piece of shit because it's GUI looks exactly like Windows, or Apple ripped of Unix when they made OSX.

I hear Vista uses a mouse with cursors. They're obviously just toeing the line and ripping off every other OS. The use of a GUI is a worrying thing too, for Apple uses that system too.

Truly, if something cannot be 100% original and unique, it is lame and is just asking to be taken to court over.

Uhmm, he was blatantly being sarcastic.

The whining about "omg this OS stole from that OS" boggles me. To make a (usually heinous, but applicable here) car analogy, it would be like complaining about other manufacturers implementing power steering in their cars after Some Car Company did it first.

In an ideal world, all OSes would be GPL-licensed anyway, and this whole argument would be moot. The beauty of collaboration versus the retarded "you stole my idea!" mentality of old school competition.

RThurmont wrote:In an ideal world, all OSes would be GPL-licensed anyway, and this whole argument would be moot. The beauty of collaboration versus the retarded "you stole my idea!" mentality of old school competition.

Feh. BSD license!

Former Microsoft employees have gone on-record saying that, when designing the GUI for Vista, they used a Mac as a "paragon of clean UI". So let's get real, here, folks. All operating systems borrow from each other, but it's pretty clear who's leading and who's following.

I don't dispute that, but there are some people who take it to an absurd level.

I would agree with Uraniun that there really is one heck of a lot of "Who cares?" factor regarding where Microsoft's UI designers got their inspiration. Yes, they ripped off the Mac. They've been ripping off the Mac since 1982, and Apple in turn got the idea for the Mac/Lisa GUI from Xerox. The only people in this entire industry who can genuinely claim to have conceived original ideas in this process are the researchers at PARC, and of course Xerox stupidly ignored their work.

RThurmont wrote:They've been ripping off the Mac since 1982, and Apple in turn got the idea for the Mac/Lisa GUI from Xerox. The only people in this entire industry who can genuinely claim to have conceived original ideas in this process are the researchers at PARC, and of course Xerox stupidly ignored their work.

That's one of the biggest myths in the computing industry. Apple did not "rip off" the Xerox PARC. They bought the IP to it because the suits at Xerox didn't think it was going anywhere and were willing to sell. And then Apple hired a great deal of the PARC engineers to work on the original Macintosh and Lisa.

Microsoft, on the other hand, brazenly copied the Macintosh without paying a cent.

That's one of the biggest myths in the computing industry. Apple did not "rip off" the Xerox PARC.

I apologize if I did not word my post clearly enough - nowhere did I say that Apple "ripped off" Xerox. I said that Xerox was the only player who could claim to have had really original ideas when it comes to GUI. I have seen Pirates of Silicon Valley, I have Apple Confidential 2.0 in my library (as well as quite a bit of other material on the history of IT) and am well acquainted with the history of the computer industry.