I’m not entirely convinced with this argument that anything built outside the bounds of a Unix-based system necessarily means you are a sharecropper. I understand the sentiment, and agree partially in what I think the spirit of his argument is, but it sounds a little too much like zealotry to me.
I also think he should have chosen better a example to illustrate his point. It turns out that while Apple did in fact copy a lot of Watson functionality in Sherlock (steal is a better word), it is in fact easier to write channels in Sherlock than it is to write ones for Watson because Apple chose to implement Sherlock using web services, an ostensibly open format. Writing Watson channels, on the other hand, involves grokking Karelia’s proprietary API and as such is slower and more difficult to implement.
In this example, Apple turns the posed argument askance; It is a “sharecropper” company using a “non-sharecropper” technologies to quickly seed a development community in order to create an arguably better product in the long run.
