[martinkallstrom]

What I am fumbling to get across is that good vs. evil is a far too simplistic model to even remotely fit reality. Everybody exist and works within extremely complicated systems and relationships. And to make it even more confusing, we tend to think short-term when we judge others but long-term when we make our own decisions. And almost all differences in opinions comes down to short-term vs long-term thinking.

Imagine these three poor guys now fighting for survival while battling Apple in court. It is to me not at all unimaginable that they some day find a 12 year old boy standing outside their restaurant with a sack of apples, selling them to by-passers for a dollar each. And that they proceed to kick the boy away with snide remarks about how he should know better. I can also imagine a bystander asking them, "Why would you do that, there is no harm to your restaurant from a boy selling apples outside" and them replying "Yeah he's a nice kid. But if we let him be the municipality might think that it is us that are selling fruit in the street. We already had problems with our business permit, and with this huge Apple litigation on top of it, we don't want any more trouble."

The bystander thinks that in short-term there is no harm at all having a kid outside selling apples. The restaurant owners think long-term and decides that they don't want it to be the beginning of a development they can't control. Both perspectives are valid although as outsiders we think that the long-term risks the restaurant owners worry about are grossly overstated and we don't have the insight to begin with. But they might be right to take a small risk of bad publicity to mitigate what they see as big risk in months or years to come. Nobody knows beforehand.

It is not that they (Apple or our imaginary restaurant owners) are forced to take this course of action. But they act in a system where they see it as the right thing to do. And that doesn't make them evil. Evil would be to go out of their way to harm others for no other reason than the inherent joy in doing so. It doesn't fit into my world view that Apple or any large corporation is doing that [insert specific exception to that rule here for a clever pun, i.e. "except Facebook, they are evil to the bone"].

And: I'm not saying that the imaginary situation above is exactly the same as the real one here. It is just an illustration of how we as bystanders never really knows what goes into a decision.