Remember the famous ad where the runner threw a sledgehammer at Big Brother on the giant screen. Well, Apple has long since outgrown that rebellious mindset if it ever was there, and the whole spiel was not just sour grapes of being so small compared to Big Blue. Well, for all its design skills, Apple is a closed shop and has no intention of joining the open movement anytime soon. Being the perennial media darling, Apple gets away with a lot of things that IBM and Microsoft would never get away with.
Until now:
Ed Bott, a veteran computer journalist, virtually screams at the guys in Cupertino in his latest PC Magazine blog post about the end-user license agreement (EULA) Apple attached to its new iBooks Author program:
"I have never seen a EULA as mind-bogglingly greedy and evil as Apple’s EULA for its new ebook authoring program."He continues:
"For people like me, who write and sell books, access to multiple markets is essential. But that’s prohibited:
Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented.
Exactly: Imagine if Microsoft said you had to pay them 30% of your speaking fees if you used a PowerPoint deck in a speech."Is that Apple getting rotten?
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