I came across an interesting story about the guys behind the popular FaceBook app FarmVille. The title of this post refers to something the company CEO told his employees at one of their meetings.
Farm Villains - The Story Behind Zynga
Apparently this company focuses on stealing ideas rather than creating them itself. An ex employee said this.
"Zynga's motto is 'Do Evil,'" he says. "I would venture to say it is one of the most evil places I've run into, from a culture perspective and in its business approach. I've tried my best to make sure that friends don't let friends work at Zynga."
It it also believed they used old arcade/console games as inspiration for cloning. Coming up with ideas for games is often one of the most time consuming things to do. You look at a game like StarCraft 2, they spent at least 2 years pretty much refining the gameplay mechanics. Someone can come along and clone those exact mechanics in probably a month.
I have issues with large companies simply because they have power beyond what I believe they should. Government gets involved at a local and national level to grease the wheels for large companies. You then look at how large companies themselves act, something like Apple, that not only trademarked a very common word/object in an apple, but also threatens lawsuits if you name a desktop theme you created "Aqua".
When it comes to software specifically, these large companies patent everything under the sun. Even when PRIOR work exists the patent offices are overrun and for the most part shockingly run places and don't check for prior work in a lot of cases. Once these large companies get a patent they go about suing everyone, even those with the prior work! If you're a lone developer getting a lawsuit from Microsoft or Apple, are you going to pony up the hundreds of thousands of dollars defending yourself or simple settle?
Any hobbyist programmer would look at software patents as the most ridiculous thing ever thought of. It would basically be like myself patenting an english phrase "Hello nice to meet you", because in the end that's what some of these software patents are like, simply in computer terms. The most simple way to solve a problem, that nearly anyone would "invent" when faced with the problem.
So a company like Zynga comes along and steals a few game ideas. Personally I don't think what they do is that big a deal and it has been happening pretty much since Pong was released. I'd much prefer to live in a world where companies like that can "clone" ideas than a world in which hobbyist programmers are threatened to be sued all the time. Is Zynga really the most evil place simply because they have an obvious goal to steal ideas? Or is a place like Apple or Microsoft the most evil place because of the power they continually wield against small developers whilst also stealing ideas?
As many of the comments at the original article state, a company that has to steal ideas is pretty much telling the world it can't innovate. Eventually people will find the original developers if they are still active and look for the real innovation. This happens with large companies, at some point they simple lose touch with reality and their user base. More and more people are looking at the smaller developers for real innovation. If you want to look at another small game developer showing the big players how foolish they are check out MineCraft.