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From: wilson@carcoar.Stanford.EDU (Paul Wilson)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss,alt.religion.computers
Subject: Re: GNUclear Warfare
Message-ID: <1989Dec16.235907.3766@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 16 Dec 89 23:59:07 GMT
References: <2558@flatline.UUCP> <4639@sugar.hackercorp.com> <1989Dec15.035457.7968@world.std.com> <4773@sugar.hackercorp.com>
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Reply-To: wilson@carcoar.Stanford.EDU (Paul Wilson)
Organization: U. of Illinois at Chicago (UIC, *not* UofC or UIUC)
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In article <4773@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>
>Apple's behaviour in this case is unethical. I think it ironic that one of
>the losers in this case is Atari (I don't know the details of the agreement
>between DRI and Apple over GEM, but I do remember that they had to change
>the GEM interface, so GEM on the Atari ST is no longer the same as GEM on
>the IBM-PC). You see, Atari was the "winner" in the original Pac-man look
>and feel lawsuit. Ironic.
>
  Maybe not so ironic.  There's a fine line between innovation and
  nearly-arbitrary design choices.  In the case of a video game, the
  "look and feel" is extremely important to the functionality of the
  product, in more ways than is the case for a graphical interface
  to a computer.

  In the case of Pac-Man, the look and feel is an essential part
  of the innovation that may or may not deserve protection.

  In the case of the Mac GUI, all of the important innovations
  were swiped from Xerox.  The ones they're suing over are nearly
  arbitrary, analogous to the placement of car's brake and 
  accelerator pedals.

  It seems to me that Atari may have been trying to avoid giving
  other people a free ride on Pac Man's innovation, but Apple
  is trying to keep people from getting a free ride on Xerox'
  innovation, by stifling the development of standards.  They're
  nitpicking about arbitrary or nearly-arbitrary details, rather
  than true innovations.

  On the other hand, I don't really know much about the source
  of Pac Man's ideas/design choices, so maybe Atari is scumbags
  too.  But it's certainly not clear they're on the same side
  of the (admittedly fine) line as Apple.

     -- Paul



Paul R. Wilson                         
Software Systems Laboratory               lab ph.: (312) 996-9216
U. of Illin. at C. EECS Dept. (M/C 154)   wilson@carcoar.stanford.edu
Box 4348   Chicago,IL 60680