Path: utzoo!telly!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsd!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!geneva.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: gnu.gcc Subject: Re: GNU's not GNU... Message-ID: Date: 10 Apr 89 01:40:00 GMT References: <28354@apple.Apple.COM> <8158@polya.Stanford.EDU> <22643@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <23295@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 26 > Gnumake duplicates the "look and feel" of make. You can never tell when lawyers will come up with new ways to turn black into white, but originally "look and feel" was based on copyrighting something as a work of art (although it now appears that you don't really have to do that). As far as I know, it has only been applied to programs that have a non-trivial "style" to their screen appearance. I've never heard of such a suit against a program using a line-oriented interface. From what I know of the Gnu project's plans, it's not likely that its projects would run afoul of anybody's "look and feel". The real issue with make would be cloning make's input language. This is a rather different legal issue. I don't recall what legal theories have been proposed there, and whether there are any relevant suits. Most Unix specifications are now part of the IEEE and international standards, so I think at this point it would be hard to claim a proprietary status for them. I do not object to the FSF taking public stands on issues such as look and feel. Look and feel could threaten attempts to reverse engineer PD versions of some software. These are close enough to FSF's aim that I think they are a legitimate area for FSF to make statements about. However if FSF is concerned about actual threats to the Gnu project itself, I'd suggest that it should retain appropriate counsel and make sure exactly what is and what isn't likely to threaten it. The statements to date do not suggest to me that they are based on legal assessments of likely threats to the Gnu project.