🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <cD2oaB8w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (To the Ground) writes:
>rainer@ki6.ki4.informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Rainer Joswig) writes:
>> There are so many ways to have a GUI and *not* being a Macintosh lookalike.

>Yes, but there aren't many ways to have a GUI and not use features which
>Apple considers its own -- resizable windows on the screen to show your
>files, menus which appear when you click the mouse button, and so on --
>unless you're willing to make your GUI very clunky and counter-intuitive.

Not necessarily true -- I've even seen one (and it is clearly
different from the Mac interface), and it is neither copyrighted nor
patented.  The people who did it even studied its use by trained and
untrained users.  I played with it for a while, and decided that it
was really quite ok.  If the FSF wants to continue the boycott as a
matter of principle, that's fine, but they're definitely NOT inhibited
from coming up with a reasonable user interface.  I've seen the
existence proof.  (If people spend half as much time thinking as they
did whining ...)

Similarly, they're not inhibited from coming up with language
implementations that conform to published national and international
standards.  "ANSI C" may be an interface, but nobody will sue you for
implementing it.  AT&T (or is it USL?) may "own" some version of the
Unix specification, but they don't own POSIX.  Get real.

On the other hand, if the FSF tried to do a knock-off of VMS, they
might find themselves another company to boycott pretty quickly.

And no, I'm not particularly interested in talking about the details
of that non-restricted user interface.  I believe the work was done at
the University of Maryland, if you're interested.

David Chase
Sun