Sparrow's acquisition highlights the dangers of closed source
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 21st Jul 2012 23:06 UTC
In the News Okay, so this is entirely new to me. Sparrow is was an email client for Mac OS X and iOS (and Windows), which brought a decent Gmail experience to these platforms - as opposed to Apple's own not-so-good Gmail support and Google's Gmail iOS application which, well, is just a webpage. Google has now acquired Sparrow, and basically all hell has broken loose, to the point of Rian van der Merwe writing that 'we' lost "faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens".
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scarr
Member since:
2010-11-07

This is a good post, Thom. I went and read the original story, and I honestly don't see what he's whining about. Like you said, he got everything he paid for, and then some, and this is for an app that costs US$15. The only thing I can conclude is that it's killing him that Google seems to have won. The guy is an Apple fanboy, and Apple/Microsoft hates Google, and thus anything that is good for Google is bad for Apple, or something like that, causing his head to explode.

Your suggestion - that Apple users consider open source - is like asking a group of religious fanatics to convert to atheism.


Right... so this guy is disappointed in a small company getting bought out and killed, and you took that and blamed him for being a frothing fan boy. And just for good measure, you brought up religion in your comment. Might as well really polarize this conversation even more!

More disappointing then your comment is that this community thought what you said was worth up voting. You'd think someone taking the extremes like this would get down voted to oblivion. You'd think people would see you are trying to get reactions from people (like I just did). I think I'm done here... go ahead and down vote this, whatever.

Reply Parent Score: -1

zima Member since:
2005-07-06

Actually, there's some research suggesting that Apple devotion might be quite similar to ridiculousness of old-style mythologies...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13416272 "A team of neuroscientists scanned the brain of an Apple fan and it showed that the brand was stimulating the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith"

Reply Parent Score: 2