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Paul Buchheit reports via Common Dreams
An emotional response to any criticism of the Apple Corporation might be anticipated from the users of the company's powerful, practical, popular, and entertaining devices. Accolades to the company and a healthy profit are certainly well-deserved. But much-despised should be the theft from taxpayers and the exploitation of workers and customers, all cloaked within the image of an organization that seems to work magic on our behalf.
1. Apple Took Years of Public Research, Integrated the Results, and Packaged it as Their Own
2. Even After Taking Our Research, Apple Does Everything in its Power to Avoid Taxes
3. Overcharging Customers
The manufacturing cost of a 16 GB iPhone 6 is about $200, and with marketing it comes to about $288. But without an expensive phone contract with Verizon, AT&T, or one of the other wireless carriers, the cost to the customer is at least $650.
4. Underpaying and Mistreating Employees
5. Apple Has Figured Out How to Spend Most of its Untaxed Money on Itself
Apple's View:
The tax-avoiding, research-appropriating, cost-escalating, wage-minimizing, self-enriching Apple Corporation has, according to CEO Tim Cook,[1] a very strong moral compass.
[1] Link in article redirects.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Wednesday May 20 2015, @12:24PM
I figured the angle of making billions by exploiting what is now called "open source" (since the term "free software" is too ideological for corporations)
"Open source" and "free software" are not the same. Apart from the genuine difference in meaning (access to source code vs. a 'copyleft' obligation to share alike), "open source" is well-defined whereas the latter effectively means - whatever the FSF currently thinks that it means [gnu.org] (c.f. the new post-GPL3 version of that article which expands it to cover what you do with the binary). Whether non-copyleft licenses like BSD were ever "free software" is up for debate.
And why would anyone work for free these days to create open source when they know that corporations will exploit their work to make billions?
So release your work under a license that prohibits commercial exploitation. Failing that, GPLv3 is a good bet because the new anti-Tivo and patent licensing clauses pretty much rule it out for embedding in commercial products - hence the way Apple has been dumping GPLv3 software like Samba [appleinsider.com] and gcc [enthought.com] from MacOS.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Wednesday May 20 2015, @12:50PM
2. Even After Taking Our Research, Apple Does Everything in its Power to Avoid Taxes
You seem to be enjoying the government tax clampdown circus (and why not have some Kool-Aid in the interval?)
All multinational companies... optimize their tax affairs, because governments can't/won't fix tax laws (to be fair, that would need a lot of tricky international treaties to actually work without driving away trade). But the peasants are revolting. Answer? Lets pick on a handful big household names (Apple, Google, Amazon, Starbucks), make a big fuss about it, organise some public floggings [bbc.co.uk] for some of their executives, and maybe cause enough customer dissatisfaction to get them to make some concessions.
Funny, though - wouldn't you have expected to see some companies with names like "United Holdings (Holdings) Plc.", "Anonymous Universal Umbrella Company Corp.", "Financial Topiary Consortium" and "Faceless Professional Outsourcing Partners" and suchlike also at those hearings...? Is it really only companies that the public actually deal with (who - love them or hate them - are producing products and services that people actually want and choose to buy) who engage in "aggressive (but legal) tax avoidance". Surely our governments wouldn't stage a bit of "tax clampdown theatre" to please the crowds without actually changing things?
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday May 21 2015, @09:25AM
Sorry - the last meant to be a reply to the original post, not the grandparent.