I'm not going to argue this (VID/PID and proprietary software) point because there's no grey area. It's pure, simple and black and white. This has nothing to do with the wronged company being Apple. This has only anything to do with Palm acting in violation of standards.

If you do want to argue, then yes, one can go either way on the laws in the US.

The bottom line is it's Apple's piece of proprietary software and Palm should keep their grubby hands off it.

If they (Palm) think they can hire 3 programmers for 2 months to write a replacement, I'm sure they would have. The problem is that it's been demonstrated elsewhere in the industry that you can have a dozen people working on this for two or three years, starting with existing code and still have but a shell of a program that relatively speaking, still doesn't do what iTunes does well. Case in point are Songbird and Media Monkey.

They could however have produced, as I suggested long ago, a program to communicate with iTunes using existing interfaces. A bridge/sync program if you will. This is totally and utterly different than what's been done now. Loudly claiming "iTunes compatibility" and using iTunes as part of their promotional points should also be avoided unless they get Apple's blessing.

I'm sure we'll see iTunes rightfully locked down, Palm made out to be the bad guy and eventually they'll get swallowed or fizzle out. The Pre is not doing well and this type of attention doesn't help it.

I'm also sure a real Apple Fanboy would have issue with anyone labeling me in the same camp. I'm super critical of Apple and think iPods (the music playing software and UI) completely suck. I don't think Apple make the best designed nor best working applications and I choose to use many third party alternatives. I've even replaced the desktop GUI because I think the Finder is extremely weak. But over-all they make far and away the best computers. I don't resent them because they cost BMW money compared to other brands, because the value proposition is fair.

Does anyone have any contacts in the engineering department at RIM? I need to give them a call to tell them to scrap their Blackberry desktop application for Mac OS and put its engineers onto another project or the unemployment line. They just need a small 8 character firmware tweak.