Announced on Tuesday, Apple’s patent lawsuit against HTC has sparked controversy -- particularly about Cupertino’s motives behind suing the hardware maker instead of Android creator Google.

Fortune Brainstorm Tech blogger Phillip Elmer-DeWitt has a number of theories on why Apple has chosen to sue hardware maker HTC for patent infringement -- with the main crux of the situation coming from a tweet by Ars Technica journalist John Siracusa first pointed out by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber.

“To me, the Apple patent suit smells like nothing more than a manifestation of [Steve] Jobs’ own sense of injustice,” the tweet reads.

As Elmer-DeWitt notes, Apple Inc. has historically been in a defensive position when it comes to legal strategy, especially where patents are concerned. Gruber notes that Apple’s suit against HTC is a rare “first strike” -- harkening back to the days when Apple sued Microsoft over the Macintosh “look and feel,” which the company ultimately lost.

Gruber suggests that Apple CEO Steve Jobs “is not so much worried about HTC’s products as offended by them,” a theory he has distilled from Jobs’ own words on the patent dispute:

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

“That’s not the language of a licensing dispute or the beginning of a polite negotiation,” Gruber writes. “That’s the language of a man aggrieved.”

The question now is, how far does Apple intend to go following their “first strike”? At least one Mac high-profile developer, Will Shipley, finds the patent dispute disturbing.

“If Apple becomes a company that uses its might to quash competition instead of using its brains,” Shipley writes in an open letter to Jobs, “it’s going to find the brainiest people will slowly stop working there. You know this, you watched it happen at Microsoft.”

“Apple is inching ever closer to evil,” concludes Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, referring to the classic Google “Don’t be evil” mantra. “I worry that there’s no one within the company who can stand up to Jobs and tell him so.”