people drive me crazy

With the upcoming release of Vista looming, there are people all over message boards on the net screaming about how Vista is a ripoff of Mac OSX and how Microsoft just copies everyone else.

Putting aside the actual factual nature of this statement, which really only applies to cosmetics, I'd bet that the user base screaming this is a huge fan of open source software. Take a look at the vast majority of open source software, what does it do? It rips off an existing commercial product. There's very few original ideas in the open source community, they're largely playing catchup. (With the possible exception of P2P software). People need to get their standards straight.

Innovation is a series of incremental improvements, almost always. Occasionally you'll get something new, but most of the time, you'll integrate a bunch of good ideas someone else had, and then add some of your own, or just combine them in a new way. There's nothing wrong with that, that's how we advance.