🚀 go-pugleaf

>Suppose Apple does win the suit.  Then no one, except Apple, can ever write
>a windowing system.  To do so would violate Apple's look and feel rights.
>The result is to make innovation illegal.  This is much worse than the
>alternative.
>
>Jim Wilson                  "If it is only a game, then why keep score?"
>wilson@ji.Berkeley.EDU          Worf - Star Trek: The Next Generation
>ucbvax!ucbji!wilson

This is demonstrably vintage bullshit!!!

1. There are numerous windowing systems that are unmistakably unrelated
to Apple's.  These are and will continue to be completely safe from
litigation by Apple. (e.g., Smalltalk-80, Xerox Star, SunView,
OpenLook...)

2. Even now, innovation continues:  "pie-chart" menus are just one
example of a very productive new graphic interface technique.  There
are others being developed but not yet announced.

3.  Apple's windowing system is by no means the ultimate example of
beauty, correctness, ease-of-use, user-friendliness or parsimony of
operating effort.  Pop-up menus are superior to pull-down menus, and
pie-chart menus may be superior to rectangular-list menus.
Window-specific menus are better than screen-global menus.  And
three-button mice are superior to one-button mice.

4. If IBM could have successfully sued the clone-makers for violating
their "look-and-feel" rights, then a lot of the industry's resources
would not have been wasted on IBM-PC technology.  The state of the art
today would be far in advance of where it is now.  Sigh.


-- 
Alan Lovejoy; alan@pdn; 813-530-8241; Paradyne Corporation: Largo, Florida.
Disclaimer: Do not confuse my views with the official views of Paradyne
            Corporation (regardless of how confusing those views may be).
Motto: Never put off to run-time what you can do at compile-time!