Sea of birds

An outrageously unfair although not surprising co-opt of public ingenuity by the higher-ups: a new era in the battle for intellectual property rights or a rerun of capital "I"mperialism, only now labor is exploited in the setting of swivel chairs and Starbucks rather than tobacco fields? Neither, I'm afraid, if only that tech-savvy developers should know better (cf. Microsoft) than to be taken in by gestures of populism and openness facilitating innovation. The metaphor also fails because (a) developers for a time reaped the fruit of their labors, and (b) can, in most cases probably, negotiate a selling price; even if they feel a maternal bond with their app and consider it a mulatto baby—this deferred extrapolation needs to die, but frankly, I don't feel sorry for them. If you can capitalize on it, somebody else can and very possibly will.