Comment by mechanical_fish

While they're at it they should probably toss Isaac Newton and von Neumann some credit, too. I mean, who did the real heavy lifting here?

And let me be the first to acknowledge all the authors of the floating-point math libraries that power the physics simulation that powers Angry Birds. Whoever you are: Nobody ever thinks of you, but I know how much work you did. Thanks.

Also, somewhere, probably in China, there is a crew of people who work long hours in a clean room, peering through microscopes, inspecting the tiny wire bonds on the RF multiplexers that will filter all those Angry Birds levels out of the ether and capture them onto our iPhones. Let me thank those people, many of whom are young and work very long hours, because I doubt that many of them will ever come to a tech conference and stand up to demand credit for their work, perhaps because they don't speak English well, and perhaps because they probably can't afford the tickets to the conference, but mostly because they're just too polite.

Meanwhile, what on earth should we expect the Rovio folks to do when some passive-aggressive person stands up in the middle of a crowd at a conference and claims to have written some underlying component of their product? Make the guy pull out his open-source license, put some lawyers on speakerphone, and adjudicate the thing right in the middle of the Q&A? Or are they just supposed to casually give credit to anyone who asks politely, without doing the necessary research first? Are software licenses supposed to be taken seriously or not? Do people not realize that copyright trolls and cranks exist?