Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Apple Still Says No To Aqua-Like Themes

Posted by timothy on from the why-not-let-people-flatter-you dept.

JoFo writes: "Eric Yang, creator of several Aqua-like themes and skins for GTK+, KDE, Mozilla, gkrellm, and others, was forced by Apple to take down all Aqua-related projects on his web site. It appears they went to his employer as a way to strong-arm him. He writes on his web site 'I went to Apple to test cocoa for Mac OS X 10.1, and found a drag and drop problem with NSPopUpButtonCell. They didn't even pay me for my effort, yet they try to shut down my project. Isn't that ironic?'" Apple seems at least to be consistent in objecting to nearly any non-Apple project that reminds the company of Aqua, so maybe this was just a matter of time.

4 of 589 comments (clear)

  1. Qt/Mac by infiniti99 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Trolltech had to recreate the Aqua look for Qt (the GUI toolkit, not QuickTime), since Qt emulates the look of the native system rather than wrapping. Like all other QStyles, there is probably close to no platform specific code in the engine. Unfortunately, only the Qt/Mac release will feature this style, as it apparently would go against "Apple rules" to distribute this into other Qt releases, like X11. So I guess it is ok to emulate the Aqua look as long as you are going to run on the Apple platform. That or Apple specifically granted Trolltech this permission, as Trolltech has mentioned they "coordinated with Apple" to make Qt/Mac.

    While I have suspected Qt/Mac will not be GPL for other reasons, I believe this is a really strong reason as to why it won't be. If it were GPL, then any coder could just snag the style and compile with X11. Why mess with pixmap styles when you have close to the real-deal as a rendering engine?

  2. Ferrari is the only company. . . by kfg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    that can use the Ferrari prancing horse logo without express permission. Ferrari is even the only company, by actual court order, that can make cars that are SHAPED like Ferraris.

    Ferrari is NOT the only company that can paint its cars red.

    There are limits to claiming 'themes' as a trademark.

    KFG

  3. Re:Do themes =~ look and feel? by Auckerman · · Score: 5, Interesting
    How different is this from the lawsuit with Microsoft oh so many years ago over look and feel?


    Very different. Apple lost because they signed a bad license with MS and it was ruled that Apple had licensed their look and feel to MS. Not many people know, as part of the IE budle/investment agreement, MS had to pay Billions (it's unknown, but that is what Apple claimed MS owed them) in back payments to Apple for licenses and as far as I know is still paying Apple to this day.

    --

    Burn Hollywood Burn
  4. Microsoft's Luna is sort of a Rip of Apple's Aqua by plaisted · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For example, if a collection of friends decide to create an Aqua-like theme and distribute it, what's that to prevent Microsoft from doing the same?

    Nothing. Microsoft has already done this, in a way. The user interface for windows XP (called Luna) seems to take a lot of inspiration from Mac OS X without directly copying it.

    And look at this shot. of Mac OS X:

    Now look at these shots of the next version of windows CE (Pocket PC 2002).

    Notice any similarities in the upper right of the screen?

    As to whether this is legal (or would be if MS didn't happen to have billions of dollars), IANAL.