Crazy thought, but, what if the primary motivation of the creator of JGuitar has nothing to do with his website, his reputation, etc.? For example, what if his primary motivation is to do something useful for others? What if his primary motivation is just to improve the enjoyment of people who like playing guitar?

I agree that Apple should have handled this differently. At the same time, I think we should honour this guy's attitude. It's refreshing and if we all behaved that way - major corporations included - the world would be a better place.

This story reminds me a little bit of the guy who made Flappy Bird, earned millions in ad revenue, then shut it down at its peak because he didn't want people to be addicted to it. Almost impossible for most of us to fathom, given that most of us are motivated by money. But it's nice to see that some people act according to different motivations.

> Crazy thought, but, what if the primary motivation of the creator of JGuitar has nothing to do with his website, his reputation, etc.? For example, what if his primary motivation is to do something useful for others? What if his primary motivation is just to improve the enjoyment of people who like playing guitar?

The whole point is that Apple never asked for this guy's opinion. That he's OK with what Apple's doing is a happy coincidence, and the next guy whose work they're going to use may have a different opinion.

Firstly, I do understand why people think this is Apple being a bit scummy, I really do. However, I do want to say exactly what you have. When I reached the bottom of the article I was expecting to see a rant/moan about how hard done by he was by "big evil corporation" and wanted some sort of compensation. I was stunned he invited Apple to reach out, so together they could make it better for everyone. Truly refreshing and reminded me of the attitude I saw more often in the early days of the web.

> Truly refreshing and reminded me of the attitude I saw more often in the early days of the web.

Kudos to the author for that. Unfortunately, he has extended his well-meaning olive branch to companies built on the philosophy of Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists.

> Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists.

Serious question: do you believe that letter to be immoral or indicative of immoral behavior? Or something specific?

Edit: format; quote.

I don't see anything wrong with the letter; if you want to be paid for use of your software, that's reasonable. Gates basically expressed that he disagreed with the philosophy of the club. Nothing wrong with that.

What's happening with Jguitar however is that a big tech player that exists because people pay for their software (iOS) setting a precedent where they're actively siphoning content outside the garden and feeding it back to users in their ecosystem, with no attribution or licensing deal with the creator. That's wrong, in the exact same way that homebrew Hackintosh machines built for sale are wrong.

Thanks for clarifying.

Yes. Everyone should donate their resources and work to megacorps to make the world better.

They should patent it.

Patent what? The better world?

Exploiting fans. Maybe they did patent the better world already.

That just makes the lack of proper attribution worse.

If you're breaching courtesy and decency it doesn't help your case that the victim is a nice person.

> For example, what if his primary motivation is to do something useful for others? What if his primary motivation is just to improve the enjoyment of people who like playing guitar?

Sure but Apple doesn't essentially have to send him the bill for it, bandwidth isn't cheap and it can grow pretty quickly with that much devices.

This simple isn’t true - Apple made an app that lets you call arbitrary links and display the result, and in a gallery added one example for guitar chords linking to this site. The gallery also has examples for third party integrations for news, weather, music, bookmarking and it’s not unreasonable to expect more for lyrics, laundry, taxis, groceries or pretty much anything else.

This site was in the examples for guitar chords, that’s about it. Maybe they should have asked him, but there’s zero obligation to do so. If you have a blog someone links to it, you don’t mind, do you?

The point of contention here is that the template linked straight into the chord image generator - which isn’t kosher. If I build a chart generator for my site, I wouldn’t want anyone linking straight into it - Apple isn’t using it on their site and claiming it’s theirs, but they’re pointing out to all their customers that they could just hit my generator directly for visualising charts. That’s weird. Not illegal, but weird.

not only that - he was grateful for them to do so!

Apple invented outsourcing api support to some of their fans, that's new.