Path: utzoo!telly!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!morganucodon.cis.ohio-state.edu!paul From: paul@morganucodon.cis.ohio-state.edu (Paul Placeway) Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: Apple/uSoft Court's "Memorandum of Decision and Order" Message-ID: Date: 1 Aug 89 17:53:44 GMT References: <1989Jul31.223834.10407@algor2.uu.net> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: paul@cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 40 In-reply-to: jeffrey@algor2.uu.net's message of 31 Jul 89 22:38:34 GMT jeffrey@algor2.uu.net (Jeffrey Kegler) writes: First, my thanks to John Gilmore for going to the trouble of retyping the memo into the net. Ditto. pow (Thanks, n) John. Apple lawyers by the judge (referring at one point to "the self-serving deposition testimony of Apple's witnesses"), those of us who support a sane software market can take little comfort from it. In fact, I found its tone worrisome. ... For example, tiled windows. The judge calls the Windows 1.0 arrangement tiled--the screen was always filled with non-overlapping windows. I assume any reader of this group is familiar with GNU emacs, which uses just such an approach. If this type of copyright can form any basis for a lawsuit, the whole industry will be paralyzed. Actually, this should be pretty easy to defend. All one has to do is demonstrate that earliest EMACS that did multiple windows (one based on TECO I suspect, but I don't know that much about 10 and Lisp Machine editor history) predated the tiled windows in question. If this feature of EMACS predates any of the Xerox Star work, then life is fine (for tiled windows). Overlaping windows might be harder to defend, but shouldn't be (anywhere close to) impossible. One key point here may involve looking at what Xerox licenses, what they did, and when other people did similar (enough) things. It is unfortunate and distrubing that the Apple/MS & HP suit proabaly won't answer any of this (although the HP NewWave part just might), but the people involved are far more interested in their own dispute (in the small) rather than legal questions of the industry (in the large). So it goes... -- Paul Placeway