Dashboard NOT a ripoff of Konfabulator
According to Daring Fireball, Dashboard widgets stemmed from an old apple application called Desk Accessories and not the cross-platform Konfabulator. Daring Fireball goes on to state that had Konfabulator fit the needs that apple was looking for, then Apple would have either bought Konfabulator, or hired the development team to work on Dashboard. However, Apple wanted something that was more tightly integrated with the OS, and that had better resource consumption and smaller footprints.
Either way, Im glad I don’t need to write custom XML and custom Javascript in order to write software for a platform that I have to pay for (granted, I do have to pay for Tiger, but I’m getting a lot more than just a widget runtime environment…).