Remember that the primary power the average HN reader has to fight abuses like this is simply not to work for the companies that engage in this chicanery. Good hackers are valuable, and companies fight for them. When companies do things most hackers consider evil, it should hurt them.
This is the same individualistic fallacy that comes up over and over again. Yes, individual actions matter for your own personal integrity, but focusing on those as a solution to what is essentially a systemic problem ignores root causes.
Society is a system that's just waiting to be hacked, if you're willing to start seeing it that way.
Society is a system made up of point-masses of personal integrity (or lack thereof). "The system" didn't make Apple decide to fuck over consumers by jumping on board with a patent troll; that decision was made by a group of specific persons who deserve neither my respect or my business.
Don't reward moral cowardice by hacking your own mind into considering it "just the way things are." Make the bastards work a little harder to buy you out, at least.
I think I agree with sunahsuh. When a system is stacked in a certain direction, appeals to personal responsibility can win battles but will lose the war. In the prisoner's dilemma, we can hope for mutual co-operation, but until the rules of the game change it's nearly inevitable that defectors will make out better.
Surely it's the rules of the game that are at fault here. You can't blame companies for using the rules of the game to their best advantage.
The answer is to tell everyone how much of a ridiculous unfair idiotic idea most patents are.
You shouldn't be able to patent software - it's trivial. You shouldn't be able to patent things like "Touchscreen used on mobile device" - It's obvious.
Patents should be reserved for things that aren't obvious, take a lot of research, and can be done many ways. For example drugs research. They should be denied and ruled null and void for most things related to software/consumer technology.
Either you stand up for what you believe in, or you don't. The "rules of the game" as you say, were made by the people that are playing it.
So if you believe that some companies have taken the patent game too far and are a nuisance to society, why not take action against it and stand up to your beliefs?
It worked against Home Depot, "the world’s largest buyer of construction material" [1]. As a result of consumer pressure [2], they turned over a new "green" leaf, and are now lobbying to keep forests sustainable[3].
Yes. If the really good people won't work for you because you're evil, that makes a huge difference.
Here, if you're old enough to remember, try this one:
"Of course Microsoft didn't care that a lot of the top talent wouldn't work for it for decades."
Doesn't sound very convincing, does it? Microsoft was badly hurt by that, and knew it. It eventually reined them in noticeably, and made them act more subtly or covertly a lot more often.
Apple will take time to see the damage, just as Microsoft did. But it will see it, just as Microsoft did.
Microsoft didn't become an evil monopoly by having the top talent. If anything it was the reverse. Maybe if they'd have some talented hackers working for them, they wouldn't have sucked quite so badly at making software.
Cite please? That claim contradicts everything I've read on the subject.
AFAIK Apple don't spend a lot of money compared to the competition even on an absolute scale. And relative to revenue, there's just no competition at all given Apple's massive revenue (~15% for Microsoft/Intel/Google, ~3% for Apple).
Apple most likely isn't in this camp, and has enough cachét and goodwill to still be a desirable place to work, but those kinds of companies usually can't recognize good hackers, or even know that there's a difference. They will execute on their harmful and odd undertakings with whoever they can find, quality or not.
This is how we end up with things like spyware being distributed under the guise of marketing.
And patent troll/patent hording companies don't need to hire hackers.
How is Apple not in the "doing things hackers consider evil" camp? They've been doing such things for a long, long time. I had hoped it might end with Cook as CEO, but apparently no such luck.
Why would you expect a business (an entity that subsists entirely on money) that has made shitloads of money to suddenly stop doing everything it can to continue to make shitloads of money?
The camp that I don't think Apple is in is the one where they can not recognize good hackers or think they don't need good hackers, which is what my comment is about. Obviously, a lot of people are misinterpreting my comment or are not reading the whole thing.
