I find it mind blowing that (in the comments of the blog post) someone asked the Path CEO:

> Why wasn't this [sending all the contacts to your servers without users knowing] an opt-in situation to begin with? Isn't that against Apple's own T&Cs?

and the Path CEO replied:

> This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned, we believe users need further transparency on how this works, so we've been proactively addressing this.

Really guys? REALLY? This is why developers need explicit guidelines, because as they just demonstrated if there are no guidelines companies default to the thing that exploits the end user! (incidentally, its unfair to pick on Path too much as almost all social networking applications do exactly this also.)

I actually cringed when I read this "however, as mentioned, we believe users need further transparency on how this works" ... which is why it took someone running a proxy and writing a blog post for you to suddenly be transparent about it. Mind blowing. Why even say that?

Btw, times like this? You destroy any and all credibility when you say you are trying to build a company that is built to last or one that is going to follow in the footsteps of Apple.

Apple would never do this to their users.

(do not make this a discussion about the evil and good sides of Apple. Apple has repeatedly not bowed to companies desires for owning contact information and I expect they will fix this contact hole in the near future.)

It's sad because I respect Path and their love of design. But design isn't just about how it looks. It needs to resonate through the entire vision, company, product, and how you treat people.

Reposted here since it seems the page linked is no longer visible (at least for me).

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Apple’s great GPL purge

Posted on 5 February 2012 by meta Apple obligingly allows you to browse and download the open source software they use in OS X. Since they have listings for each version of OS X, I decided to take a look at how much software they were using that was only available under the GNU public license. The results are illuminating:

10.5: 47 GPL-licensed packages. 10.6: 44 GPL-licensed packages. 10.7: 29 GPL-licensed packages. This clearly supports the idea that Apple is aggressively trying to remove all GPL-licensed software from OS X. While the removal of Samba and GCC got some attention, the numbers show that there’s a more general purging going on.

The 29 remaining GPL-licensed packages aren’t too healthy either. Lion apparently ships with bash 3.2. That’s from 2006. The current version is 4.2.10. Why no upgrade? Because Apple’s shipping the last version of bash that was under the GPL version 2.

The message is pretty obvious: Apple won’t ship anything that’s licensed under GPL v3 on OS X. Now, why is that?

There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want.

So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh?

I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?