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From: sal@grip.cis.upenn.edu (Marcos Salganicoff)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: A sad day...
Message-ID: <39316@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 18 Mar 91 22:40:14 GMT
References: <46878@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <1991Mar7.221241.18977@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1991Mar18.181117.4352@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
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Reply-To: sal@grip.cis.upenn.edu (Marcos Salganicoff)
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Turning this into a mac vs. pc war is silly. The fact is that it's
fairly obvious that a lot of systems have used overlapping windows for
a while, the only reason Xerox didn't win in its suit against apple is
because of statute of limitation type arguments. And now apple is
turning around and suing microsoft, fairly hypocritical I'd say. I
wouldn't weep too much for microsoft, I'd bet that they move more
applications for the mac and ibm-pc than anyone else. But anyhow, I'm
not down on apple, the problem is with the nebulous definition of
"look and feel". Why for example does X-windows use overlapping
windows, yet there is no copyright problem vis-a-vis apple? Does
anyone actually know a definition for "look and feel"? In the mean-time
we're all screwed because products are designed to interact  in sub-optimal
ways to avoid infringement litagation. 
We are the losers until this "look and feel" is clarified. Apple and
Microsoft win. The  GNU  manifesto is sounding more and more reasonable.

-Marcos



General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception Lab
UPENN
Philadelphia, PA (USA)