I doubt their poor compliance to standards is done maliciously. I'm guessing it's more about needing some service, finding an open standard or code that does what they need, making changes that are convenient for them, then moving on to the next project.
If not malice then willful harm through inaction. The service should be shut down or fixed.
From the Article:
> "Google’s CardDAV server silently wipes out all kinds of data it doesn’t care about."
How is this "bad" functionality treated differently than issues found and publicized after a 90-day-count-down in the security disclosure universe?
They likely have known about their noncompliance, and they must know the impact; they are a technically savvy group. Plus I presume they have the financial resources to fix this with a year-to-year rising stock price currently at 1,095.50 USD.
"... moving on to the next project" is irresponsible after unleashing a service which when used correctly WILL corrupt users' data.
Their documentation could probably be more complete, but it does say, for example, that they don't support user defined fields on WebDAV requests.
I suppose they could have opted to not mention CardDAV or the other standards and just published an API called GCard or something like that.
They do mention that interoperating with Apple's operating systems is working, so that may be what determined the subset they care about.
> service which when used correctly WILL corrupt users' data
So that comes back to who gets to define what correct use is? If you follow the Google documentation and are losing data, then I agree with you. They should fix the problem or update the documentation.
We need to change the culture of software development such that this behaviour is considered unprofessional. Perhaps a professional software engineering association might help?
