🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991May21.172118.22744@kithrup.COM> sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes:
   (Devil's advocate mode)
   Ah, but if I spend millions of dollars researching and developing a
   wonderful user interface, and someone can just "knock off" a clone of it,
   why should I bother with doing the research at all?  (Incidently, this is
   why UI copyrights are even worse than patents.)

There are two major reasons. One is that you couldn't just invest
millions of dollars and get back a good user interface even if you
wanted to.  Good user interfaces seem to be built by a continual
feedback between users and implementors. This has been the case with
most of the good user interfaces that I have used, and, as far as I
can tell, it has also been the case to a large degree with the
Macintosh user interface.

The other reason is that most of the hard work in building a good
interface is in the detail and politics, not in any kind of idea that
needs to be protected by anything but copyright. A good user interface
requires virtually bug-free implementations with great attention to
detail, as well as enough influence to enforcing consistency.

					Thomas.