Sauce for the goose

So, the ./ crowd is always griping that Microsoft is an evil monopoly, etc, and that they steal others’ technology and pass it off as their own. Right, then: why don’t I hear the same folks complaining about products like Evolution that blatantly steal Microsoft’s user interface and application behavior (in fact, Evolution is an Outlook clone, except it doesn’t work as well as Outlook does)? Worse, what about XPDE, which steals (oops, I mean “recreate[s] the Windows XP interface to-the-pixel point”) the entire user interface of Windows XP? The XPde FAQ says (paraphrased) “Microsoft can’t sue us because we’re not copying anything that they can copyright”– but that doesn’t make their copying right. Pure hypocracy.
Hey, Linux guys: if you want to beat Microsoft, do it by making something better, not by copying their investment.