Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!polyslo!tweinst From: tweinst@polyslo.calpoly.edu (Tom Weinstein) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs Subject: Re: Boycott apple! Message-ID: Date: 22 Jul 89 02:20:15 GMT References: <8907202252.AA02288@sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu> <85@euteal.ele.tue.nl> Sender: tweinst@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU Reply-To: tweinst@polyslo.calpoly.edu Distribution: gnu Organization: Cal Poly State University -- San Luis Obispo Lines: 53 In-reply-to: mart@ele.tue.nl's message of 21 Jul 89 07:22:04 GMT In article <85@euteal.ele.tue.nl> mart@ele.tue.nl (Mart van Stiphout) writes: >In article <8907202252.AA02288@sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu> GNURU rms@ai.mit.edu >writes: >>Apple is trying to create a new kind of legal monopoly, a monopoly on >>a class of programs based on their user interface. If they succeed, >!! >the making of free compatible imitations of commercial software would !! >>be illegal. > >You said it. Who do you think you are that you can copy other peoples >ideas and disturb the market by distributing free copies of it. >How would you like it if I took your C compiler, ported it to ^^^^^^ >computer X and sold it for good money. >There is nothing wrong about creating software and distributing it freely. ^^^^^^^^ >It is very wrong to steal someones product and feel good about it. ^^^^^ When you say port, you mean working from the source code. What the FSF is doing is reverse engineering software from the specs, and the way it interacts with the rest of the world. Not quite the same thing. Source code is definitely a copyrightable resource. I don't dispute this. What I do disagree with is the idea that "look and feel" is copyrightable. This would imply that, for instance, any program that printed out the date and time in the same format as, and accepted the same arguments as, the UNIX 'date' command would infringe on AT&T's copyright. To me, at least, this is stupid. The same goes for a C compiler. Obviously, the C language is very standardized, and all compilers are hopefully going to accept identical code. However, are we going to start suing each other just because the machine dependent parts of our compilers produce identical executables? What I am trying to show is that the definition of "look and feel" is not as cut and dried as many people think. You may think that Apple has a right to protect their windowing interface. The only problem with their doing so is that it implicitly grants the right to protect other, somewhat less unique, user interfaces. And where does it end? What, exaclty, can they protect? Close boxes in the upper left? Striped title bars? Or even windowing interfaces in general? Once you open this box, there isn't any shutting it. I think that Apple has a right to protect their source code. But if somebody wants to take the time and effort to duplicate their user interface independently, who is Apple to say that they can't? >Mart van Stiphout >Eindhoven University of Technology >Dept. of Electrical Engineering -- Room EH7.34 >P.O.Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands >Email: mart@euteal.ele.tue.nl >------------------------------- -- Tom Weinstein | tweinst@polyslo.calpoly.edu | ucbvax!voder!polyslo!tweinst