Slashdot Mirror
Apple Threatens Open Source Theme Project
cloudscout writes "Macworld UK is reporting that Apple is threatening the Mac Themes Project for creating a theme editor. Apple accuses them of contributing to trademark infringement by enabling people to copy Apple's graphics. They've issued a cease-and-desist order insisting that MTP remove their theme editor from all webservers under their control, "including any hyperlink to other locations where the material may be available". They're even trying to invoke a shaky clause in their OS licenses which prohibit reverse-engineering the operating system since the theme editor utilizes unpublished specs. Apple is famous for its unfriendly attitude toward developers and tech media, but this is just ridiculous. How could they possibly suffer any damage by MTP's efforts? " I'm seriously disappointed to see this. Apple's lawyers are their own worst enemy: they've tried so hard to make Darwin open and gain acceptance, and then to pull crap like this. Its just so dumb I don't know how to respond.
screwdriver: primary purpose - turning screws.
theme editor: primary purpose - making own themes.
gun: primary purpose - throwing a bullet at dangerous speed through the air.
See the difference?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
A fish and game warden comes upon a woman sitting along the river with a rod and reel.
He accuses her of fishing without a license, because she has the equipment.
She promptly accuses him of rape.
He's flabbergasted -- he's not even touched the woman.
The reply: "But you have the equipment."
Simply making a tool that people could use to violate Apple's trademarks/copyrights/IP and that has other uses is a reasonable thing to do, and, if Apple were reasonable, would not be a problem any more than IE, which allows you to copy Apple's graphics from their website and do with them what you will. I do notice that Apple's not suing Microsoft...
Dejaffa
There is no 'i' in team, but there is in fiasco...
Linux may have been developed for the PC computer, created by IBM, MS, and the Federal Justice department, but before then the S-100 bus systems were considerably more open.
MS was subsidized by IBM because the government was attempting to destroy IBM's monopoly over computer hardware. So IBM found so.meone else to create a PC OS for them.
Competition? MS lived on indirect government subsidy almost from the beginning! And the "openness" of the PC was because when MSDOS split from PCDOS, MS needed someone to manufacture the hardware. Even with the subsidy they were too small, and IBM didn't dare compete directly (and didn't think it too important, and didn't want to cannibalize their mainframe business). So Compaq and Zenith and Packard and Bell etc. got into the hardware business with the MSDOS operating system. And since IBM had the dominant position, most of the new 16 bit programs were written to run on the PC, and MS new the internals of PCDOS, so they used inside knowledge in creating MSDOS so that the same programs would run on them.
Fair competition. Yeah! Maybe once, but the more I look, the more it looks like a myth. Insiders making sharp deals is more like it, and certainly much more common, no matter what the laws say.
(Or so it seems to me.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you can create your own themes, isn't this the opposite of trademark infringement? After all, this means you're replaceing the Apple trademarked graphics with something else. Something else you or someone else homebrewed.
There's only two reasons I can think Apple be upset about this.
1) Fear of having their interface diluted. They don't want the MacOS associated with joe phearsum's 1337-7h3m3. Or maybe even joe graphic designer's luscious theme. It's worse if they throw in apple graphics.
2) They feel like they're legally bound to defend trademarks.
Of course, given the fact that most of their customers are fairly loyal, asking people nicely not to use apple graphics in their own themes would probably work....
'course, now that they've lost goodwill....
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Tweet, tweet.
Just don't bolt a handle from an old car door to the top of it, then glue all your mouse buttons together to form one "super" button.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Apple put the Theme system in back in 1994 or 1995. It was part of Copland and their idea of a scalable user interface. There were three Themes shown: Platinum, Gizmo, and High Tech. Apple even hired one of the guys who works on Kaleidiscope (a third-party Theme switcher for the Mac).
When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he killed Themes. The official reason was that it made tech support too hard: people would call up and it was impossible to know what and where widgets would be on their screen.
Personally, I think it was just Jobs' control-freak personality showing through. The Apple engineers implemented Aqua as a Theme in OS X (in older versions of Mac OS X, you could remove the Aqua Theme files and you get a Platinum look and feel. I don't know if this still works.), so there's some support for the concept inside the company. It's just crazy Steve Jobs again...
The bigger question is if Apple is going to try to squish any shareware developer who writes UI widgets to fix the awful problems in Mac OS X. Aqua is pretty enough, but there is such a huge usability problem with OS X, I find my WinNT box at work easier to use than OS X at home. I've been booting back into OS 9 and realizing how _simple_ and _fast_ everything used to be...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
If Apple were a person, I'd think of them as a creative individual with schizophrenic tendancies marked with delusions of grandeur and persecution and a possible self-destructive urge.
Certainly lashing out at the Themes editor is crazy . . .
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Your right, there are probably more KDE and GNOME users than OSX users out there, but if you have used OSX you would realize that they are two completely different worlds of usability.
Though technically KDE and Gnome did bring A desktop to UNIX, I have a rough time comparing a window manager/development framework to a true desktop computing environment.
I have been using OSX for about 5 weeks for development and administration. I don't even turn on my x86 box anymore. With the headstart that OSX already has on KDE/Gnome and the speed that it's moving.. I have a hard time believing that even KDE will catch up to it.
the problem isn't KDE but the fragmentation of the linux community. The only chance that KDE maybe has to Linux Standards project. Until then I am still fighting with not only administrating our servers but my own workstation, no thanks. OSX is here to stay for me.
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
I'll take this one.
I remember this clearly because I was looking to purchasing my PowerMac G4 around that time. Originally, the first PowerMac G4s were going to be shipped with 400, 450, and 500 MHz processors. However, the thrice-damned Motorola was well into the swing of giving Moore's Law the finger, and they couldn't produce enough 500 MHz processors to meet the demand. Apple made a move that many, including myself, considered ill-advised at the time. Since they couldn't sell 500 MHz PMG4's, they retroactively adjusted the entire line -50 MHz for the same price. 400 MHz machines became 350 MHz machines for the exact same price. They simply waved their hand over all orders and changed them. I think I remember them giving special condolance offers to people who already had orders in the system, but everyone afterwards had to pay the same for less. It was a total rip-off.
I ended up with a 400 MHz (middle-of-the-line) machine, with the intention to upgrade it with a dual-processor card (which has yet to materialize), but I feel a little upset in that I could've gotten that processor for cheaper before the change.
Anyway, that's what he was talking about.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
4: Or maybe how they claim PowerPC processors kick the crap out of x86 processors. Remember how they used to say the G4/450 was double the speed of a Pentium III/450? Somebody explain to me how a G4/733 (with an extended pipeline as the P4 has) can be double the speed of Pentium 4 1.5 ghz if that was the case. Do the math people....
Well, you're kind of off-base about the pipeline.
MPC7400 -- 4-stage pipeline (Fetch, decode, execute, and writeback)
MPC7410 -- 4-stage pipeline (Ditto...)
MPC7450 -- 7-stage pipeline (Didn't find the names)
All this information can be found on Motorola's website in their technical specs for the processors. I'm very unhappy about them moving to a 7-stage pipeline, since that small, simple pipeline has been a key to competing with x86 processors. However, to say that they are just as over-extended as the Pentium IV is ridiculous. The Pentium IV has a 20-stage pipeline! That can be a 20-cycle gap in execution when you have a branch mispredicition. Sure, it can dispatch 6 instructions at once, compared to the MPC74XX's 3 at once, but when 50% of your instructions are memory-bound load/store operations, it doesn't really help that much in the average case. This why even the Athlon doesn't bother with more than 3 even with its 15-stage pipeline.
Granted, Apple is exaggerating by saying that just because certain operations (all SIMD-heavy Photoshop filter) complete at half the time of a top-of-the-line Pentium system, that the PowerMac G4 is always going to be twice as fast. However, the fact remains that for those operations, a chip clocked at half the speed does perform twice as fast. It does go to show that MHz as a rating of performance is just an imaginary figure used to blow magical marketing smoke. Apple just decided to Blow Smoke Different.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I can't see a single post commenting that - as usual - companies sometimes threaten suit for trademark infringement because they are legally obliged to.[1] Don't forget that if you don't defend your trademark, then it becomes something anyone can use. This would be worse for apple than letting the themes site continue.
I don't think anyone gains out of this but the lawyers. If Mr MacThemes managed to engineer his software such that it couldn't copy images tagged as apple's trademark[2], then I think the suite would disappear like snow off a dyke, since as everyone is pointing out, this hurts Apple too.
-Baz
[1] IANAL
[2] And why not? It would be trivial for apple to put 'Registered Trademark of Apple Corp' in a tEXt chunk of a PNG or whatever.
I agree that Apple should fire (or at least muzzle) their law firm, but overall it's not that bad of a company.
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
"Microsoft clobbered Apple -- and the rest of the industry -- with openness."
That was IBM, not MS. Even IBM didn't want to build an open system, they were forced into because Apple already had such a lead that IBM didn't have time to design a closed system. When clonemakers reverse-engineered the PC, IBM sued them and lost.
Microsoft was never for openness, and neither was IBM. The US courts and IBM clonemakers were responsible for cheap, open PCs.
"Linux itself exists only because Microsoft created the modern microcomputer industry, where standardized, fully-documented hardware was available at reasonable prices dictated by a competitive marketplace."
Intel created the modern microcomputer industry. IBM helped them with the software side. The competitive marketplace, again, existed because of the PC clonemakers and the US courts, in spite of IBM. Microsoft never even entered the picture.
"It's no coincidence that Linux was first developed for the same hardware platform as DOS."
Coincidence? That was Linus' personal decision: beacuse the 386 was fairly cheap and fairly capable. Because Intel made a good, cheap chip. Not because of MS.
"Microsoft has always been open and competitive. They encourage competition and thrive on it."
MS is an anticompetitive cartel. They use anything from copyright law to patent law to contract law to undocumented features to make sure their competition does not have a chance.
MacOS X includes a full version of OS 9.1 in the box with it. Users do not need to, as you suggest, spend an extra $100 to upgrade "to OS 9.something in order to run their 'Classic' applications". If they purchase MacOS X, they automatically get the software required for Classic compatibility.
First, this almost completely unknown software is now making headlines on all of the trade websites. This is going to instantly boost the popularity of the project.
Second, open source contributors are going to be less likely to develop software for MacOS X if they're going to be expected to clear all of their development plans with Apple's legal department first. It's hard to be creative and "Think Different" under these kinds of restrictions.
Right foot. *BLAM* Left foot. *BLAM*
Why do you attack you fans? Why do you embarass us? Why do you make all of us that defend you feel stupid? Why?
Who cares about lousy Themes? Why must you guys always come across as jerks?
Put someone in charge of the legal department from PR, ask not if you can win the case, but ask if this action helps Apple.
Why?
Yes that's the best part about the world today. You know I don't see other enablers getting sued. Otherwise gun manufacturers would be gone in a week. You cannot prosecute the tool creator. It's the end user who puts it to use in whatever way they see fit(that's from my department of redundancy department). It makes me sick.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
You missed the point didn't you?
The editor enables third parties to "improperly copy Apple's copyrighted software code and graphic files.
So we should stop making word processors because someone might write something that is a copy of something copyrighted?
unauthorized reverse-engineering of its software.
This battle has been fought out in court by others and it has been decided its legal to reverse engineer software. It doesn't matter if some group of Nazi's has authorized you.
Obviously there is a whole lot of history that you are completely blind to. I just thought I'd make these points before other someone starts to agree with you.
Their motivation is this:
It is not a copyright issue. It is a trademark issue, and as has been said here many times before, trademarks exist on an "enforce it or lose it" basis. If they want to retain the right to spank people in the future for ripping off their trademarks, they must remain agressive about enforcing them agains everybody, all the time.
That's all that is happening here. Their lawyers are over-reacting a little to protect Apple's trademarks.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
They may be wrong, but that's what we have the courts for.
Your attitude is exactly what I was talking about. You hear about one company suing one group and start shouting bloody murder at the top of your lungs, instantly insisting that Apple is an evil emprire out to destroy your freedom. I would bet $100 that you never even used Themes... you probably have not even heard of them before today, and more than likely are not even a Mac user... yet you are among those complaining the loudest, because you make the knee-jerk, yes "us vs. them", assumption that any big company that sues a small group must be out to ruin democracy.
Count to ten, think calmly. You might come to realize that while Apple may be wrong about the extent of their trademark rights, they very well might credibly believe that they needed to press this case in order to protect their trademarks. Things are not always as simple as the Big Bad Corp trying to squish the Little Guy.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Sure, except we are talking about two completely different products here.
The MacOS 8.1 (which is what this lawsuit concerns) is an old product that the probably would rather not spend legal resources licensing out to other people. It's a lot cheaper to just send people letters saying "quit ripping us off" than it is to establish a policy for pricing and distribution of licenses to every tiny shop of GUI hackers that wants to play with it.
The good news is that Apple eventually treats their old OS releases as Abandonware. You can download System 7.5.3 for free from their website and monkey with it all you want. I suspect that they will eventually do the same with OS 8.0 - 9.1... probably a few months after they have migrated the vast majority of users and apps to OS X.
OS X, on the other hand, is built on open source code, with open source licensing. You can hack the shit out of "Darwin" all you want. Write a totally new GUI for it, port it to run on a Sparc, whatever trips your trigger. Apple can't open up Aqua, because a lot of the tech involved is owned by another company (Adobe). Nor can they open up Quicktime, which is built on a closed codec that they don't own... but the open kernel and BSD layer is clearly their future direction. Apple is slowly being transformed into the company that NeXT could have been if it didn't lack the resources and market force. As a developer, even if you don't like Apple as a company, this is a Good Thing. NextStep was easy to write for, and if the trickle of new apps already coming in is anything to go by, it looks like developers are having a pretty good time with OS X, too. I suspect that we are going to see some pretty cool ideas emerge out of all this.
Opening up a company like Apple is like opening up China. Sure you can shout at them and try to freeze them out, but that will just make them shut their doors to all of your ideas. By working with them, you can gradually introduce your philosphies into their worldview. Peaceful transformation is slower than confrontation, but it is also far less painful.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
On one hand, Apple wishes to leverage the power of open source development, and on the other they want control over their intellectual property. There is no doubt that this causes internal conflicts at Apple. They *should* be very careful on how they handle this situation.
First off, if they alienate open source developers, they lose a significant portion of their developer support. I'm not sure if they care at this point, because they have a working, published product. This is still dangerous for them though because they are scaring away potential open source help for future projects.
Second, Darwin/OSX can be viewed as something of a ground breaking experiment in alternative development methodologies. As with many past projects, they are really setting future corporate development trends here. Other companies wishing to apply this development method will doubtless follow the trend Apple has already set. If these companies proceed without any notion of what an open source developer sees as right and wrong, the trend is sure to die quickly.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Meanwhile, I'll comment that Rob's statement:
[T]hey've tried so hard to make Darwin open and gain acceptance, and then to pull crap like this.
makes the asumption that's central to the Slashdot mystique: that contributing to free software development and buying into Stallmanesque ideology are necessarily intertwined. The reality is that most of the individuals making significant contributions to free software, including Darwin, have little no to interest in the 2600 wannabe mentality that has come to dominate Slashdot and very few of the IP complainers will ever contribute to any project.
No, the real problem here is that Apple continues to alienate the early adopters, tweakers and hobbyists who are the core of the companies user base and who are the ones who kept it afloat.
I'll close by pointing out that it was my favorite tech company that finally _really_ brought Unix to the desktop, while Slashdot's pick turned out a slow, bloated Explorer knockoff, and fired half their workers the day they finished it...
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Seems Slashdots manta is if its on the internet, it must be true. This project has an activity of 0% with no released files in 6 months and out of the blue Apple tries to shutdown what appears to be an already inactive project. Did you bother verifing this report?
Burn Hollywood Burn
They should. Third party developers are the life blood of an operating system - especially an operating system made by a company that doesn't have a monopoly on the applications market.
Witness Microsoft. It costs a bit to buy VS6, but if a developer can get it, he has all kinds of information and help at his disposal. And he doesn't have to worry about being attacked by Microsoft's lawyers, either. If he's good, Microsoft may even buy his product! What a deal!
You and I may not like all the stupid shareware and freeware applications - heck, some of them are downright useless. But this is spurring on developer interest and mindshare, and that's what an operating system needs in the long run to survive.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
creative individual with schizophrenic tendancies marked with delusions of grandeur and persecution and a possible self-destructive urge
I'm platform agnostic, but spent a great while in the company of Mac-users and this is true for just about every one I've ever met.
The sysadmin at the college where I was a volunteer webmaster? He would constantly go on and on about how great 'his' platform was and how superior it was over Wintel, and then in the next breath complain of all the conspiracies Microsoft was involved in to make sure that he and other Mac users were never able to play the good games or use any of the popular apps. Then he'd turn around and try to see how much warez he could upload to public servers without getting caught.
The graphic designer I worked with?
He would spend hours ranting about how our company's PC-using tech support area would abuse him because he was a Mac user, but then go on and on about the hardware superiority of the G3 over the eqivalent Pentium-II's at the time. Then he would fire off incindiary emails to the company president.
I *could* go on, but I think you get the point.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Apple has had a modular 'theme' system built into the macos since around system 8.1 (maybe 8.5?) and has never released or even mentioned a theme editor or any themes. In fact, there is only one legit theme file (platinum), so the 'theme' menu in the appearance control panel has only one item in it. All of the themes you can download are unofficial and unsupported, and now I guess they are trying to put a stop to them. You have to wonder why apple wrote in their theme system at all... it has been there for a long time and they have never made any use of it.
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The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
I was hoping to keep this out of the press until we had more time to prepare, but since someone leaked it already
Apple has two complaints against the software, Theme Machine, which allows users to create themes for the Mac OS. First:
So their complaint is not that we are infringing on Apple's trademarks, but that we contribute to other users ability to do so. I can't imagine that argument holding up in any court. Because I did not help to write the program, I cannot speak authoritatively about the methods used to develop it. However, preliminary research indicated that those methods were appropriate via the fair use doctrine established in Sega v Accolade under the Ninth Circuit Court Of Appeals.Of course, all of this is moot, because we are just a few random guys who have never met face to face, and have neither the funding nor the desire for a protracted legal battle with Apple. Ironically, we've been doing this for more than two years, and the Editor doesn't even work with Mac OS X. I'll be pulling it shortly, but if you'd like to get involved with the Mac Themes neXt project, please contact me
Well, I don't know a whole lot about OSX or this theme tool. But I believe that this theme tool is open source, right? And it's using some of Apples unpublished API's right?
I don't think it's the fact that you can make other themes for your mac that they object to but rather that the themes project is, with it's open source, in effect publishing API's that Apple doesn't want published.
.sig? Get your own damn
You Get what you pay for. Apple hardware is high quality. Not some cheap OEM crap that Dell spits out.
The 3rd party memory that now doesn't work under the latest firmware was memory that did not match the specs that the machines should have had in the first place. There is still plenty of 3rd party modules that did work. Those people that got bit by this were the ones who went for the el cheapo sticks.
Yes please do the math. There is more to the processor than just the Mhz ratings! A 733Mhz G4 will beat a 1.5Ghz P4 in some tests (just like the P4 will beat the G4 for in other specs).
Apple is a company. Heaven forbid they would want to make money and defend themselves...oh my, can't have that. Open source this...open source that. Screw open source! Just give me quality software and I'll pay for it.
"The Funeral Procession"
Oh yeah...they've been saying that for years...sing a different tune the repetition is boring.
I taped a Tupperware bowl to the back of my monitor.
I was quickly becoming an Apple fan when the whole MacOS X thing began. "Yes, Darwin is open source! We're thinking forward. Here, have our source!" It didn't take long to realize that this was all nonsense. Their motivations are the same as any other large corporate entity: they want to have things their way and they are not going to give an inch.
And here they are, stomping their feet and pouting. "We don't want anyone to change our interface! It's our interface, leave it alone! *pouting* Oh, and themes were our idea!" Is it any surprise?
This is simply marketing hype.
Why bother.
Here we are again with companies going after the enablers rather than the people committing the crime:
Apple claims the editor enables third parties to copy its copyrighted trademark themes
I claim MS paint enables me to copy Apple's copyrighted trademarks. Just as DeCSS is a possible enabler to a crime, this program and thousands of other utilities can "enable" crime.
How can they possibly hope to have this stand up in court? Or are they hoping someone will just crumble rather than fight?