This is why Apple Sucks...

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas--George Bernard Shaw"
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I started out the immediately previous post under the same heading but ended up deciding to divide the content into two posts -- one about 'The Birth of GNU' and the other about this current one 'This is why Apple Sucks...'. The reason is that the content is too large and I felt it would be better to maintain lucidity and focus if I divided the two.
So talking of why Apple sucks. Before we get there, lets review what ended the predominant Hacker culture of the yore. The hacker culture suffered a major blow when greedy corporates decided to block sharing of programs and software by using the legal teeth of Proprietary Licenses. Thankfully, there were those like the FSF who kept the openness in Computing Industry using tools like GNU and GNU GPL.
Talking of Openness, lets look into one case of Apple.
It once boasted of radically new ideas and challenging the supremacy of the bigwigs in the Computing industry. Then over the years, especially more recently, they fell prey to the web of proprietary licensing. Look at Mac OS for example. It borrows heavily from BSD. BSD being a pioneer in the Opensource, Free software movement. BSD Unix developed by Berkley University was distributed freely to encourage bug fix and development of new software. Apple borrowed from it, and in return what did they do? They converted it into a completely closed piece of software. Mac OS is a proprietary a proprietary software can be. Software is the heart of any Digital Device. Every Digital Equipment that Apple manufacturers requires an Operating System. The OS here being, Mac OS, that is use to run all the product offerings that Apple has in the market today. From its computers to its ipods and iphones, each run Mac OS. The very same Mac OS which borrows heavily from a free OS (BSD). Infact, over the years the company has grown up to be so closed and secretive that they wont even let users change their own iphone batteries. All is fine as long as the users behave like brainless cattle and are subjecting themselves to be herded like cattle. But the moment the users start asking for their Freedom in software, the company will puts its sharp toothed legal puppies after you. Look what happened to Psystar (Try Googling it). Mind here, that we are not asking for Hardware openness. We are talking about Software openness. A hardware manufacturer are ok to have their hardware design secrets as long as they open the interfaces and input-output algorithms so others can write software for them and improve existing software. This is because copying each piece of hardware requires a fixed repeating investment. If you have one computer circuit that takes $10 to make, two will take $20 to make, 3 will take $30 to make; so therefore hardware secrecy is ok as long as the input-output interfaces are open. But what is the cost of copying software? By the same argument as before, if one code of software takes $10 to make, it takes almost zero dollars to copy it to another media. But the greedy proprietary software vendors market and sell it as a commodity at the same price every time and thereby hoard money and prevent innovation in software. This is what Apple does. This is why Apple Sucks...