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Apple Still Says No To Aqua-Like Themes
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.
Let me spell this out: Apple owns the copyright on the design. Apple has the right to enforce this. Anyone who thinks they can get away with it is kidding themselves.
Aqua is not the only thing they have going for them in Mac OS X(.1), but it's a big thing; it's what differentiaates them from MS in screenshots, etc. If any system can look like theirs, they lose out. I know it's nice, I'd like it on my Linux desktop as well, but it's Apple's property and this is their right, so let's not act too surprised that they try and stop it.
Let us, however, ignore that Be never cared, QNX doesn't care, and MS really, really doesn't care (it probably even makes them laugh when a Linux WM has a Windows theme). Apple is 'special' in that they have to keep their lawyers fed or they start to go ambulance chasing when they get bored.
In all honesty...
:)
the aesthetic aspects of MacOS are it's best attributes.
Seriously, a lot of work goes into the UI design at apple, and it's a shame that it's constantly ripped off. Not just by free software people, and not just by Microsoft.
I think that free software people should spend time coming up with their own cool-looking interfaces (like a lot of the stuff on themes.org) and not just copy other UI's.
I don't think that they will ever be able to claim rights to "all pretty translucent themes."
Just name it something else already.
If you get into trouble, throw some prior work, like your favorite drinking glass into evidence.
This might be flame bait for some, but why are we so upset about companies wanting to keep their own image?
Of all things to fight about, it seems that the appearance of a desktop should be the least of our worries. If Apple wants to keep their Aqua desktop to themselves, fine. Let's be creative and make something better. There are many themes out there that rival Apple in functionality and appearance.
I found a bug in NSImage that makes deallocating objects across the Objc-Java bridge fail, and I doubt I'll get a t-shirt. When he filed a bug report, apple make no cliam of repaying people for their free services. I don't think Linus sends people cash or free Tux Dolls when they make fixes to the kernel.
.rsrc file and split it into two, for instance).
I am kind of peeved at apple not allowing themes. Maybe they're just holding back on their own theming system for sometime before Macrh 23rd of next year. I guess they're philosophy makes sense: they want people to look at a Mac OS X machine and know for sure that it's a Mac OS X machine. Plus, if it's a theming system not from apple, future updates could hose the system over (The move from 10.0.4 to 10.1 to one
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
The law is designed such that if companies want to stop a few people from taking advantage of their work, they have to stop everyone.
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?
Clearly Apple is in competition with Microsoft, and it doesn't have any particular desire to permit Microsoft to make use of it's so-called user interface innovations.
Apple clearly built the Aqua theme, and spent a lot of time and money developing it into something that Apple hopes to be a brand-identifier. For a 3rd party to create a very similar branding, and then release it in such a way that Microsoft could use it flys in the face of why Apple developed the interface to begin with: To outpace Microsoft in interface design.
So although I feel for the individuals who have spent so much effort to clone the Aqua interface, it is also easy to appreciate Apple's stance on this issue.
I guess Apple has not learned the lesson which resulted in their nearly single digit share of the computer market- namely that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
The more people who are familar with the Aqua theme the more people will admire it and the more people who will purchase OSX or an Apple product to run it on. The more people who see Aqua, the more people will realize how truly lame Microsoft Windows has become.
We users of Linux are not the enemy. It's our nature as evolutionists to adapt what is superior and advantageous and disgard what is not. We spread the word, we improve the breed. We also turn vicously and persistently against those who oppose this natural way. Their legal actions can't change nature, they can only create ill will.
I hope someone outside the US will take up the Aqua bandwagon and propagate the theme. It's beautiful.
Seriously, a lot of work goes into the UI design at apple, and it's a shame that it's constantly ripped off.
You're right, it's not just a shame, but a travesty! These thieves have to be stopped. This aggression will not stand. What kind of worthless, sociopathic people would deliberately rip off important UI design elements from another compan...
Oh, wait.
We're talking about Apple, right?
Never mind.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Because theu did this retroactively. They let microsoft get away with several GUI rip offs for a couple of years, and then when apple went to the courts when they thought microsoft had gone too far, it was already too late to do anything about that. Now they're making sure they protcted their IP early and often.
Good business strategy: learn from past mistakes.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
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?
Apple has a really bad taste in their mouth from the last time their "look and feel" was blatantly copied. I've used Aqua quite a bit since it came out (one of our machines here at work runs OS X) and it is a *very* slick interface. If they set the precedent of tolerating copying by allowing us Linux users to use similar themes, M$ would have a very good argument to cover their butts when Apple inevitably sues them for doing the same thing.
-sting3r
It's no more shallow to try to protect their IP rights on Aqua than it is to spend the time to make all of these Aqua-ish themes for GTK+.
I've never heard someone defending skins by saying you shouldn't be shallow. It just doesn't make sense.
-bugg
How different is this from the lawsuit with Microsoft oh so many years ago over look and feel? Apple lost that battle, right? If so, then what possible claim can they have over a theme, which is essentially just look and feel?
If people are ripping off the actual icon files then that's one thing. But making something very similar, though not identical, seems like another look and feel issue.
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
If it didn't apply to M$ (as it obviously didn't)
Two key differences between these themes and MS:
1) Apple stupidly gave MS a license along with access to the GUI, and it was badly written enough to be construed as giving them some rights to substantially similar. (Bad lawyers are even worse than lawyers)
2) MS did not create an "Apple" look. They stole most of the features of the interface but didn't have square buttons with lines across the top of the window, as the old Apple interface had. It would have been an open-and-shut case had they done so.
So if this guy had a license and had created a theme that used bulbous buttons but didn't substantially replicate the Apple look, he would have been scott-free.
then when apple went to the courts when they thought microsoft had gone too far, it was already too late to do anything about that.
Um, no.
The judge did not say to Apple "you waited too long", nor any variation on that idea. First, the judge threw out Apple's claim that Apple could own a nebulous concept called "look and feel"; the judge required Apple to list specific items where MS had infringed. Then the judge went down the list, and struck out any item that was covered by Microsoft's agreement with Apple. (You know, the one where Apple agreed not to sue MS. Of course Apple did sue MS, one of the reasons I am not a fan of Apple.) Anyway, there were only 12 items on Apple's whole list that were not covered by the agreement; the judge then went down this list of 12 items and struck down all of those that Apple didn't own, which was 12: i.e. all of them. With literally nothing of Apple's case left, the judge ruled in favor of MS.
Now, when Xerox sued Apple for stealing, the judge did indeed rule "you waited too long".
They're not patening a static color set, but a dynamic look and feel which only applies to an OS. You can take picturers of OS X and post it all over your car, your wall, etc, but NOT ON ANOTHER OS. Because the OS has nothing do with ur car, it can't lead to customer confusion. On the other hand, pasting it ontop of windows very well could.
If Ford made a car that looked exactly like a Honda except for the entirior mechanics, they'd get sued and rightfully so.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Because theu did this retroactively. They let microsoft get away with several GUI rip offs for a couple of years, and then when apple went to the courts when they thought microsoft had gone too far, it was already too late to do anything about that.
The Federal Trademark Dilution Act didn't become effective until January 16, 1996. Until then it was legal to steal just about any GUI as long as it didn't cause a likelihood of confusion or deception. When the god-awful Dilution Act was passed, all of that changed.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
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
Chicken sandwich is not very complex. A better example would be if HP started releasing their calculators, and they looked EXACTLY like TI's on the outside, but on the inside they were completely different. That could cause huge amounts of customer confusion.
It's not like you can patent the circle, but if you develop a multidimensional implementation of a mechanical device that utilizes circles, you've got something to claim IP over.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
(Prepare to lose all karma)
Apple has changed, Apple is no longer the company it once was. Aside from the fruit-shaped logo and the menubar running across the top of the screen, Apple Computer is pretty much a modern consumerish NeXT. I've used Apple machines since my former job bought a small group of Lisas in 1983. While I mainly used Amiga and Windows machines at home, I had grown to love the Mac and it's various shaped beigeish gray enclosures. Over the years Apple had made one hellofa a platform. By 1992 we were using Quadra 950 and 800 machines stuffed full of ram, video and graphics nubus cards, and all sorts of wild accelerators. The MacOS (System 7.1 at the time) had no problem with our multiple monitors or our 640x480@30fps streams of mjpeg compressed video. Color correction, TrueType fonts, postscript, ethernet networking (both TCP/IP and AppleTalk/Ethertalk) worked great right out of the box. Macs in that era were ungodly expensive and worth every penny. Perhaps they still are today, though in a slightly different way.
Then came 1993 when Apple start seeding their early PowerPC machines, and eventually began selling them in 1994. Apple forgot how to make great hardware. They began to rely on the CPU to do everything. Sure the PowerPC had some great oomph, but it alone could not make up for poor design elsewhere. Luckily, the second generation of PowerPC based macs in 1995 (7500, 7600, 8500, 9500) were **very** improved, yet still nothing like the Quadras were back in their day. Eventually the third generation (G3) of Macs shipped, first in beigish gray boxes and later in the funky blue&white swing-down enclosure. By now Apple was bring back the performance, incorporating USB and Firewire. But what they had was nothing much more than a modern PC with a different CPU and OS. The G4 machines with their mighty PowerPC 74X0 CPUs have allowed us to do some pretty exciting things with the CPU alone, but again, it's nothing too special.
So what has Apple done to differentiate itself? When Steve Jobs returned he and his gang of NeXT thugs took the marketing and software angle. They introduced a funky new interface that looked nothing like MacOS, NeXTstep, or Windows. They created some cool consumer and pro apps (iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro) that made use of the G4 architecture and other features of their machines. They've also become far more mainstream with their retail stores, online ordering, and strict warranty policies.
It comes to me as no shock that Apple wants to defend it's GUI look-and-feel. I love the Macs I use at work, but to be honest, Apple is always on the brink of disaster. Consider the following: PC makers, along with motherboard designers integrate more cutting edge features that ever, and do so with great stability and success. Software makers, especially Microsoft, cater to both the newbie while still offering powerful professional features (much like FontSync and ColorSync) all while maintaining tight integration with said PC makers. Drop the price a bit, woo some users. Build some cool enclosures that both look nice and are a dream to work with. Boom. No more need for Apple.
If you think about it, this is already happening. And fast. As every month ticks by, Apple has to work harder, better, and faster to keep up. It should be no surprise that Apple wants to defend one of the very things that differentiates itself from the commodity Wintel PC market.
Apple has done some great things over the past 25 years, perhaps more so than any other company short of maybe SiliconGraphics and IBM. I applaud their efforts and love working with their products. I also wish them the best.
On one hand, I can see how Apple might be a bit sensitive about people copying their look and feel, especially after loosing their Windows battle with Microsoft in the late 80's.
On the other hand, if Apple were smart, they'd parly the desire for Aqua themes into Mac sales. A simple and direct ad campaign, "why settle for a cheap immitation when you can have the real thing..."
Perhaps instead of shutting down Aqua themes, require that they include an icon and link back to Apple
Hmmm
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
... If I were an Apple executive, it'd seem like free advertising to me. Besides, they took his product, so the least they could do is allow him to continue development on it.
And since everyone in the open source 'movement' seems to believe that Apple supports them, why didn't Apple just offer to pay him for the project and make him one of their developers?
It's what I would have done.
Do you like German cars?
Apple legal has always been very brutal. If you go back far enough, you'll see that they have not lost a match yet, except for Apple vs. Microsoft. Even so, they did get Microsoft to basically admit that they just ripped off the MacOS. They won the legal battles with Colorsync, Quicktime VR, some company that copied the imac, and some other stuff. Not to mention a million and one Cease And Desist orders to places like macosrumors.com.
Personally, I think Apple should sue Microsoft for stealing the rubber ducky and putting it in Windows XP! That's just SO WRONG!! it's Apple's ducky, and those punks at Microsoft think they can just horizontally flip it and call it theirs. It doesn't work that way! I'd go so far as to say the rubber ducky should be Apple's mascot.
Wait. I think I heard from somewhere that Microsoft did remove the rubber ducky. Any truth to this?
I can understand why Apple doesn't want other operating systems to look like OS X, but why don't they want Mozilla to be able to look like an OS X app?
The shareholder is always right.
I dont think he was expecting to get paid.
I think what he was poining out was that literally, for his help he should have expected gratitude (perhaps in the form of an email?) however in actuality his bug fix made apple more aware of his "activities" and they shut him down
This is a form of irony as the literal meaning is the opposite of the actual meaning
The Borg assimilated my race & all I got was this lousy T-shirt
All I have to say to Apple is:
SOSUMI
If somebody was trying to sell Mercedes-looking hood ornaments, so you can put it on your used honda, I imagine they would get sued.
Yes, I disagree with this, no car aficionado would mistake a junky hundai with a mercedes hood ornament *coughlinuxcough* for the real thing, but the "rest" of the population(the unwashed slobs) wouldn't know better. That's how I see the whole OS X UI debacle.
Funny, I would think that misusing the word "sociopath" would be far more serious than misusing the word "ironic".
No, Eric Yang, it is not ironic. What it is going on is very simple. You are unilaterally, and retroactively, trying to impose some sort of bargain, agreement or understanding upon Apple. One that that they had no prior notice of, much less agreed to in advance.
When you, Eric Yang, tested cocoa for Mac OS X 10.1, and found a drag and drop problem with NSPopUpButtonCell, you did so without any prior expressed or even reasonably understood conditions, understandings, agreement, or contract. You gave a gift of your own free will. Apple had absolutely NO reasonable notice that you were doing your testing pursuant to your secret, unilateral, unexpressed subjective belief that if you did such work, you could "of course" help yourself to the intellectual property embodied in Apple's themes.
The solution next time is quite simple. Be honest and up-front. Contact Apple before you do the work and offer an explicit, clearly express contract: "I will do 'X' if you let me do 'Y.'" If Apple refuses your offer, then simply do not do the work.
What you should not do is give a gift -- or what every reasonable person would construe as a gift -- of service while holding a secret, undisclosed, subjective, unilateral understanding that the "gift" is in fact conditional, and then whine and complain when your previously undisclosed condition has not been satisfied.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
> 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?
If I babysit your kids a few times, is it okay for me to smack them around a bit also?
Whew, that was close. That car nearly killed you. I saved your life. Shall we go back to my apartment?
Irony? No. Misplaced entitlement? Yes.
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.
Yeah yeah You're SO RIGHT. And it's also a shame that Apple rips off the hard work of the BSD coders. Without the resource of *BSD and its legacy of openness Apple Computer would be dead and rotting without a prayer of resurrection.
Apple has been given LIFE itself by people who share their work --work that is let's be honest, a shitlaod harder than the noodlings of Apple human interface designers-- and yet they turn around and send LAWYERS to E. Yangs employer to squash his homage to the Mac interface?
In all HONESTY, to hell with these fucking parasites.
1. Apple's look and feel is pretty general, and there is tons of prior art for it. (pick your favorite shiny, transluscent, pretty image/skin)
2.
3.
4.
so that no one else can make a shiny transluscent pretty skin.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Is there an analog of Godwin's law that states the first person touting their membership in MENSA automagically loses?
Well, there should be. We can call it Gibson's Corollary to Godwin's Law.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
If you people had any idea what people like me go through to create successful interfaces I don't think you would take this so lightly. Just because we do our work in Illustrator instead of emacs doesn't mean we're sitting there doing a paintjob. I used to code, I once wrote a device driver for Solaris [for a Gretag SPM-50 spectrophotometer if you're interested] but real UI design is the same amount of work.
Developers in general don't have to deal with criticism from VPs or C*Os about the validity of how their stored procedures are set up. You don't have to sit behind a one-way mirror and watch a user rip the result of the last 3 months of your life to shreds.
As far as Apple and Aqua goes, you have to realize what it is that Apple really sells. They provide a whole experience that spans hardware, software and everyhting else. They invested millions upon millions of dollars in developing Aqua so I don't think it's a big suprise when they see someone mucking with their stuff. I think they are less worried about "competition" than they are about their work being "diluted" and offered on a system that doesn't work as elegantly.
What is everyone's great desire to rip off Apple's look anyway? Make something better if you're the expert.
"Look and feel" arguments made by Apple have been lost in the past. Being "similar" is not a good enough reason to be shut down. Many cars are similar to others. Many tools are similar to Crescent's tools.
You cannot copyright a "look" or a "Feel." Perhaps a "Feel" can be patented as it involves a process or a series of processes. But a non-specific look cannot be copyrighted.
First, I would take the approach that making these themes can be a form of satire and is protected speech. The expression can be as deep or twisted as you like.
But only specific works can be copyrighted. Simply making a gui "shiney, blue and semi-transparent-looking" shouldn't be considered enough. Prior to the creation of Mac's Apple, I am certain other artists have created graphics with shiney, blue and semi-transparent-looking things in their works in the past. If Apple can sue based on that amount of similarity, the surely people who created their art prior to Apple's Aqua can sue the hell out of Apple.
But there must be hundreds of cases where copyright suits were lost on the grounds that the work in question weren't similar enough or were protected speech. This attack on creativity and free speech should be defeated for the priciple alone.
Apple's lawyers are just trying to earn their pay and justify their jobs. I hold them blameless. Apple believes they are protecting their stockholders' interests. I can blame them only for their lack of conscience and good sense.
Thoughts?
The buttons in the Aqua theme look like Dr. Mario vitamin pills. Is Apple infringing nintendo's look and feel now?
Actually, the "Vitamins" game in the freepuzzlearena package infringes both nintendo's patent 5,265,888 on the game of Dr. Mario (although non-infringing gameplay is also available, and the infringing gameplay can be compiled out) and Apple's trademark on clickable buttons that look like vitamin pills (the default theme; create others with the Allegro Grabber).
On Windows, you just need binaries, themepaks, source, and this DLL. On *N?X systems, you can recompile it from the source archive; it requires the Allegro library.
Have fun stepping on the toes of big corporations!Will I retire or break 10K?
perhaps if the BSD people had used the GPL apple would either (1) have much of OS X under the GPL or (2) be dead for not using the BSD people's work out of fear of 'infection'.
but i guess that's why we have BSD v. GPL flamewars.
-sam
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
BAHAHAHAHAHA! You should have stopped while you were ahead.
-Legion
i use sawmill on one puter, and macos on the other. i can't change the button bindings in macos, so i set up sawmill to use the same bindings and button positions.
... thanks apple!
:)
this works well, and stops me hitting the window menu every time i try to close an app (or worse). they don't have to look identical, just so long as they work the same on the subconcious level we use switches on (what stops you having to think "which is the indicator switch" in your car).
ironically, now that i'm using the (unthemable) macos x, i am confused as all hell again because i'm used to macos 8.6. shite
apple should realise that user interface should be more flexible (and easy to restore, if you want to enforce consistency), and that there are legitimate reasons for using an aqua or macos workalike on a non-mac platform.
what's the best way to report improvements to apple for bugs and the like? i've got a call sheet here
I get tired of Apple's lawyers telling people what to do. Its the law, so what. There are more important things you know. A legal right is different from a natural right, you know. We're talking ethics here. If I am a painter and you made a painting that looks like my painting, does that mean I get to tell you not to show anyone your painting? Of course not!
But, if I am that same paining and I am copying it a hundred times so that I can sell it and the only way I can make money off of it is by being unique and different; then can I tell you to put your painting off the wall and not give it to anyone?
Yes! Of course they can! Because I am a poor company and spent so much money on my own paintings and if I allow you to paint something similar, I would not make as much money as I could have (also known as "losing money" in business speak) so of course I have this right!
Truth is, there is no ethical reason for taking this project down. It seems that the guy is having problems through his employer...well, that sucks.
So what do I say to do about it? Screw them. Stick the whole thing on freenet and tell people where to get it. Put it on newsgroups and get people to mirror it if they want to risk it.
What we do on our free time is our business and screw the intellectual property laws. They don't have an ethical leg to stand on!
Ok, let's see how fast I can get rid of all my karma....
I don't mean to start a holy war or anything, but after reading the majority of the posts thus far I'm confused. While I agree with most people on here, that Apple has a right to defend its design from being copied, is there a double standard here between Apple and Microsoft? I just can't understand why when Microsoft does something like this it's the "Evil Empire" but when Apple does the same it's defended by the community. Then again, I guess I shouldn't try to understand the mindset of a group of people that post goat sex links and racist jokes more than anything else.
Keep Austin Weird!
Microshaft stole thier implementation of Xerox's "desktop" operating system and ruined thier OS business.
Then a clone maker came along for IBM hardware and ruined the margin on making machines.
Apple has been screwed by others since the day computers became available to the people.
Regardless of my (or your) opinions of thier hardware, software, OSes, and so on, if you were Apple, would you not fight with every single fiber of you being to protect everything you could?
They are not going after people for money... they are simply saying "we made Aqua, at consideralbe expense (and again, I don't care what you think of it... it cost them heaps of money to develop) so please don't give it away to other platforms".
Windows XP, Linux, or whatever does not DESERVE a GUI as nice as Mac OS X. My mom can buy a crappy box with Win XP and be frustraed by it. Having an OS X look alike theme could amke her biased agiant Macs. My mom would have no f*ing clue how to use Linux, so if see ever had to use a machine with Linux installed, and it had an Aqua theme, she might think that So X was hard to use. I *did* buy my mom an iMac, and installed OS X on it. She damn well humps the machine she loves it so much.
So porting one is not only an infrigement of copyright, but just plain wrong as well.
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
I find it really interesting that a guy who just got in trouble for copying a company's graphics (whatever you believe the merits of that are) is using the sky background image STAIGHT OFF OF TRANSMETA'S OLD WEB SITE.
Is this a quiet way to rebel or is he just stoopid?
http://kered.org
or whatever color it is. they fought and won a court order which says that their distinctive color cannot be used in any other soda brand.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
perhaps they're a bit too shallow
I just love the fact that Apple is this concerned about a "skin". Heck, skins for desktop OS's that have but a tiny fraction of the Mac market share. Oh sure, it's shallow and petty. Thing of it is, it is some serious recognition of how one of the larger industry players view KDE, Gnome, and the *nix desktop in general.
If something this silly ever did make it to trial I doubt they'd get all that far with it. A "skin" does not a UI make. I have yet to see any of the *nix desktops do that trippy task bar warping magnifying thingy. None of the *nix desktops do that genie bottle thing when minimizing or restoring apps either. Thankfully this is still true. That stuff is slow and annoying, but it sure do look perty.
After using both a bit, KDE's Liquid engine looks and works a LOT better than OSX anyway. Apple and Microsoft should worry. There's just too many folks that would dump them both if the apps they needed were elsewhere. Going to be a real interesting landscape in the computer industry a year or 2 from now.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Translation:
"...however, I am a card-carrying tool..."
Christ, I hate MENSA. There's nothing quite like a Smarter Than Everybody Else Club.
Apple is always on the brink of disaster.
:) I'm always surprised to hear people really do believe people buy Macs just because they look cool. That's just icing. And the bit about a "dream to work with," you sure make that sound easy to implement. It's not a one time thing. It's a design philoshopy, one that costs substantial time and money to develop, maintain and enforce. Apple spends a considerable amount on continually evolving the concept of a personal computer. Those 30% margins? A lot of it goes right back into the products.
Apple's the one with $4.2 billion in the bank, who has laid off a total of 50 people since the PC industry downturn, and (with one exception) has profitable every quarter since Q1 1998. Contrast this to all the mass layoffs throughout the industry. There is tremendous value in the company.
PC makers, along with motherboard designers integrate more cutting edge features that ever, and do so with great stability and success
Stability? Which industry are you talking about? Certainly not the one with Gateway, Compaq, VA and HP in it.
Apple has some of the best hardware overall in the industry. The were the first to ship DVD-R, first with built-in wireless antennas, first (and only, as far as I can tell) with gigabit ethernet standard on desktop hardware, and the legacy-free aspect of the iMac certainly drove USB acceptance. Their machines are quite energy efficient, and in some cases, fanless. Their towers are the easiest to manipulate of any manufacturer I've seen. There are weak spots, like the bus speed, but there is plenty to appreciate as well.
Software makers, especially Microsoft, cater to both the newbie while still offering powerful professional features (much like FontSync and ColorSync) all while maintaining tight integration with said PC makers
Tight intergration with PC makers? Is that intergration as in "include Netscape and we'll revoke your license" or as in "this driver keeps giving me error messages?"
Build some cool enclosures that both look nice and are a dream to work with. Boom. No more need for Apple.
It's just that simple, eh?
It should be no surprise that Apple wants to defend one of the very things that differentiates itself from the commodity Wintel PC market.
You're right, it's not. The legal system says Apple has to virgiously defend its ideas at every point along the way, or loses the right to do so later. I don't think Apple's really all that concerned about people buying a machine to run Linux instead of a Mac just because E has an Aqua theme.
But here's something else I'm wondering about -- why are people still creating Aqua themes? Apple has asked repeatedly for people to stop. Why does this continue? Surely theme creators can come up with something new. Why not just respect Apple's wishes? It's not like OpenSSH, where you need replication for compatibility reasons.
You don't even have to look at it from a legal perspective since they haven't actually sued anyone. What if somebody asked you to remove a desktop picture they created from your theme package? Wouldn't you do it? Is this all that different?
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I didn't think so. I'm formally trained in niether psychology nor psychiatry, nor have I met Eric Yang; but I am a member of MENSA and a student of human behavior. I think I know a sociopath [slashdot.org] when I see one.
And DAMN you know how to pound your dick on the table to try and convince everyone you are right!
Being a student of behavior doesn't really make you any more qualified than anyone else to make the observation of if someone is a sociopath or not. And a MENSA membership doesn't qualify you either - which kinda makes me question your wisdom of posting that you are a MENSA member. Plus, anyway - 2% of the world can be a MENSA member. If you would have said you were a IQuadrivium member, I might have been more impressed ;-) (only .1% of the world can qualify for that one. And there's ones with even more stringent restrictions on IQ - of course, there's certain problems with quantifying extremely high IQ's in the first place!)
In other words - please, if you are going to try and use something to prove your point, how about I dunno... use the wonderful ability to hyperlink to relavant information instead of trying to turn this into an "I'm smarter than you" style contest. More people listen when relevant information is presented, while attempting to make people believe you have a bigger dick really doesn't do anything but make people scoff at you, and totally disreguard your statements completely.
What's really IRONIC (damned if I'm not havin' some fun now!) about this is that you've claimed Eric Yang to be a sociopath. However, you've already exhibited at least one sign of a sociopath - excessive boasting. More likely than not based on your MENSA comment, you could also potentially have a second problem that's commonly exhibited: Grandiose sense of self-worth.
So quit callin' people names and flingin' terms when you think the ignorant masses don't really follow what you are saying. You might be surprised - a really large number of us are actually somewhat intellectual ourselves, and do know the definition and meaning of large words.
(Ok, I SWEAR - that's the only time I've ever used the term 'intellectual' attached to a group of people that includes myself. Sheesh.)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Personally, I think Apple should sue Microsoft for stealing the rubber ducky and putting it in Windows XP! That's just SO WRONG!!
Apple and Microsoft signed a cross-licensing contract back in 1997. The rubber ducky is covered under this agreement.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
In any case, it's not worth worrying about. Aqua looks slick, but there are lots of nice looking themes, many of them more usable than Aqua. Rather than trying to clone Aqua, perhaps it would be better to port more free themes to MacOS X and give it a fresh, non-Apple look.
Yes, it does. The fact of the matter is that changing the background color alone can make a big difference in whether a copyright or trademark has been violated or not.
There is also the fact that Ferrari's logo has always been considered a bit on the weak side legally, at least with regards to the horse.
You see, that horse isn't Ferrari's invention, he took it from an insignia of an Italian fighter squadron in the first place.
Again, nicely illustrating my point that the ablility to trademark themes has its limits.
KFG
This attack on creativity and free speech should be defeated for the priciple alone.
Please explain how Apple protesting plagiarism of Aqua is an attack on creativity.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
For example, why did Apple limit all the licensing agreements so noone could manufacture a Mac clone?
Because it was driving the platform into the ground. The Mac, as a platform, is in much better shape today then when the cloner makers were around.
Hell, I'd love to have a Mac at my home, but not for a price that would make my parents broke!
iMacs start at $999, and iBooks at $1299.
But the only thing they've returned back is the kernel, which is of very little practical use.
Ummm... what? How about QuickTime Streaming Server, NetInfo, OpenPlay, and CDSA? They've also submitted patches to FreeBSD and Apache.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
If you look on TV, you'll notice that everything about an Apple computer is easily recognizable. Apple's computer designs are one big marketing ploy, turning the owner him/herself into an advertisement. Much like Abercrombie&Fitch t-shirts.
If you see a PC across the room, you barely notice it. If you see a Mac across a room, you notice. Nothing else looks like an iMac, a G3/G4 tower, an iBook, etc. Apple wants to be visible, and that makes sense.
The same goes for Aqua. Aqua looks like nothing else - and Apple wants to keep it that way. If Aqua themes became popular, then screenshots from Apple computers would not stand out as much - and therefore, Apple would not burn itself into peoples heads nearly as clearly.
That's the same lame excuse that comes up again and again, and it's false. If Apple claims protection under trademark law, yes, they need to enforce their trademark, but they can still license it to whoever they want to. If Apple claims protection under copyright law, they can enforce as selectively as they like without losing their copyright.
Whether Apple actually has rights under either trademark or copyright law to gumdrop-based, colorful interfaces really has never been tested. So far, it's all just hot air and lots of expensive lawyers.
How ironic it is, everyone is focussing on MSFT bashing these days, and Apple, using a BSD-based (i.e. UNIX based) operating system now is often perceived as an ally in our battle against MSFT.
In contrast, it is not Microsoft that was ever opposed in particular by GNU (of course they are/were opposed by GNU just as any closed-source company is, but nothing in particular). It is Apple, because they have always had this "tradition" of militant protection of their look and feel. For many years GNU boycotted Apple because of this and forbade that any GNU software be ported to Apple (might be a reason why Apple chose BSD and not Linux as foudation for OS-X).
Then they'd get a pretty nasty surprise when they found out that chicken sandwiches aren't copyrightable. The recipe, however, might be protectable as a trade secret, but you would have to prove that A) you had used reasonable means to protect your trade secret and B) Jack in the Box still stole it.
Folks, PLEASE HAVE A BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF IP LAW before acting like you know what you're talking about. This is a copyright issue, plain and simple. If Apple wants to defend the work of its artists, it's damn well able to do that.
I shudder to think of a world in which everybody can just copy anything they like without regard to the rights of the original author. I make a living writing software, and I'm pretty happy that nobody can just appropriate it and sell it as their own.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Ooh MENSA
;)
now I'm scared... Now I realise your awesome use of English and your grasp of modern language usage is simply vastly superior to mine in every possible way, which explains why my failure to see any value in your posts is merely a failure on my part
Or something. It's early on a Friday morning and my sarcasm organ isn't sufficiently stocked with caffeine as yet.
But, I mean - do you really expect that Slashdotters will be impressed with your membership of somehting as crass as MENSA?
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
I was denied to use this interface unless I used their library.
I don't know exactly what he was denied to use, but it sounds to me like he tried to implement his OWN version of the interface rather than just using the available library, which Apple provides in thier development kit.
So he has to buy the SDK and use the actual Apple library so that Mac OS X (under development for YEARS) doesn't have a bunch of half-assed imitation interfaces lurking around. They've been doing this since the beginning: enforcing a UI standard.
Use the Apple library. It's there. It damn near ensures UI compatibility, and it's probably more flexible than anything you can easily concoct.
I'll back Apple on this one. Knowing how hard they've worked, they're going to make sure that anything you develop for for OS X (or to look like Aqua) is going to use Apple's libs.
What's the problem?
Is he suprised he didn't get paid?
As I understood his comments, he was only pointing it out that Apple is all to happy to take input from the community, but doesn't allow the same community the freedom of artistic expression.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
What is everyone's great desire to rip off Apple's look anyway? Make something better if you're the expert.
I chose that quote for the subject, and for a reason. Did you consider the fact that people have looked at Aqua and liked it very much? Apple has a history of making usable UIs, so Aqua may not be an exception.
Yet, quite a few of us are not willing to switch the platform we're currently on. Not to mention buying a completely new set of hardware, should we want to have an Aquaish UI. I think you could call it the freedom of choice. Personally, I think Aqua is a bit too bleak for my taste but I do understand why some folks would want to use it.
As to why ripping off a good design? You pointed out why professional UI design can manage such wonderful results: there are several professionals who get paid to shred the unfinished work to pieces. If they have high enough standards, they won't allow their work to be left unfinished and a half-baked UI to leave the door. Add a good number of designers, working in unison to get results that will withstand such brutal approach and in time, something worthwhile WILL come of all of it.
Such resources are just not available to OS folks. At least, not a good majority. These folks have to rely on user feedback and bug reports. And who do you think writes them? Geek users, not professional usability experts.
So please forgive us for wanting to use our platform of choice, probably with a very attracting UI. Apple has managed to create a UI that draws mimics like a pot of honey would flies. They should be very, very flattered. For all I know, they very well may be - they just have chosen to limit Aqua's availability to only those running their operating system.
You make your own decision whether this is a good or bad choice. I am not competent enough to decide it for someone else.
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
Since I was the one who was trolled first, I must take full responsibility for all this. Sorry to have started yet another pointless Slashdot thread. :)
This is yet another case of giving trademark protection to a distinctive interface. Trademark protection should be limited to the words and symbols used to identify a product. Things which are part of the product itself, like an interface, ought not to be covered by trademark.
I'll go even further and say that the color brown should not be an UPS trademark, and that the curvy bottle should not be a Coca-Cola trademark. Only names and logos (markings, you see) should be covered by trademark.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
You see, that horse isn't Ferrari's invention
;-)
No kidding, the horse evolved... what? 15 Million years ago or so? I'm sure that copyright's expired
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
If not for BSD, then Apple would probably have purchased a proprietary Unix as its core OS. It would not be as compatible with BSD as Mac OS X is, though, and all those BSD coders wouldn't be as overjoyed with their new iBooks or whatever. (The Mac is now an even better second computer to go with a BSD or other Unix desktop or network.)
... is it really too much for Apple to ask theme designers not to rip off their stuff for a little while? Microsoft is going around cutting off air supplies and promising a complete IIS "re-write" by a year from now (yeah, right), and Apple is asking people to give them a break on Aqua while they try to lift a few more of us out of this Microsoft Morass(TM) 2001 that we're all in, with Code Red and Windows Media and C fucking backslash all over the place. Can't we give Apple a break and let them be the first one to introduce Aqua to Windows users?
... damn! Mac OS 10.1 is really good. Check it out! Everybody can find at least one feature in there that will make their jaw drop when they try it. For me, it was burning data DVD-R's like they were floppy disks (4.7GB floppies that cost $6 each and take 20 minutes to burn in the background). QuickTime performance is also really something, and DVD playback looks so real that you want to touch it. A sad note is that the rubber ducky icon from Mac OS 9's multiple login panel which somehow appeared in Windows XP's new multiple login feature is not in Mac OS X's multiple login ... it has pictures of big cats such as pumas and cheetahs instead (Mac OS X internal code names). Sad to see the duck go from Mac OS 9 to Windows XP instead of to Mac OS X.
Sharing digital stuff is not a zero-sum game. BSD is the Compatibility Fairy, spreading compatibility around by providing core stuff that you can build anything around and it will still be able to talk to other stuff. BSD licensed stuff is meant to be used by everyone, that's the point.
The most compatible part of Windows is its BSD TCP/IP stack. Is it good that Microsoft "stole" that code? Imagine how much better the Web would be if IE for Windows used Gecko. Then we would really have a compatible Web, and the Internet Appliance market would probably have a chance because they could put Gecko on top of a BSD TCP/IP stack and the Web would still "look like the Web" to a Windows user, with the same rendering that they see on Windows. You'd be able to run a Gecko-based browser on BSD and a page would look the same as on Windows. In these kinds of common areas, code that everyone can share without restriction really benefits everybody.
Now, when it comes to the distinctive graphical look of a software product that is the only competitor to Microsoft Windows in many, many markets and is just about to have its mainstream coming-out
I'm not defending lawyers or anything, and I know the guy in this article is skinning X-Windows, not Windows, but a guy who skins Windows XP to look like Mac OS X is not helping the free software community. Compare the proprietary components in Windows XP to their open Mac OS X counterparts and tell me which one you want your local artists and musicians running, which one you want your Grandma running. Even the BIOS-equivalent on the Mac is an IEEE standard, called OpenFirmware, which is also used by Sun and which has the cutest little Penguin icon that it uses to show bootable Linux volumes.
By the way
Is it a language problem? Much bigger C-based GTK apps, like pan start up much faster than the smallest KDE C++-based app. But, again, pretty much all Windows apps are MFC based, so what did they do to improve speed?
The linker is still the biggest problem with C++ app startup speed under Linux. It's simply never really taken into account (and thus been optimized for) C++, because until relatively recently, there was very little software available for Linux that was written in C++. Now there's both KDE and Mozilla, both major flagship projects, and both suffer quite badly from the inadequacy of the Linux dynamic linker.
It's being worked on. In the last few months some very large bugs have been fixed in the linker which seriously affect app startup speed, and a proper library prelinker is also being worked on too. However, neither of these have yet appeared in an official release of glibc yet, and even when they do, it could take some time for them to filter down to the distros.
That's not to say there aren't some areas that KDE and Mozilla couldn't optimize in their own code, but that is relatively easy and well understood by comparison, and recent releases of both KDE and Mozilla have had some heavy work in these areas.
As for objprelink - well, it's an interesting and useful hack, but that's all it is - a hack. It does offer a significant decrease in app startup time, but nowhere near as much as a proper long-term solution will. There are also some concerns that it may decrease speed in certain areas once the app has started, or that it may introduce some subtle bugs.
One other thing to watch out for regarding app startup speed is the kernel VM system. I have seen KDE app startup speed cut by about 20% by upgrading to Linux 2.4.10, and there may be more to come later as the new VM is tweaked further. This is especially true of machines that have little memory, but it seems also to apply to a certain extent to boxes with lots of memory - the new VM appears to be somewhat faster at allocating pages for a new process.
Microsoft OSes don't suffer too badly these days from linking speed problems, as lots of Windows has been written in C++ for a long time, and thus the dynamic linker had any speed issues associated with C++ ironed out a long time ago. However, they have had their fair share of similar problems in the past - for instance, there was a bad speed issue in Windows 95 with dynamic linking if executables and DLLs did not have their data aligned to 4k boundaries (the size of an MMU page on IA32). Rather than fix the linker, Windows 98 runs a regular scheduled task which searches through all the executables and DLLs on the system and modifies them, aligning them to this 4k boundary. And don't forget Microsoft's other strategy for dealing with app startup time - to load all the required libraries for important apps at boot time so that they're all in-memory and ready-linked. Word doesn't start up nearly so quickly if you remove the Office Startup application from the Startup menu...
> BTW, what godaweful plugin do I need to look
... don't disrespect it. 99.9% of the video you have ever watched on a computer was QuickTime, even the stuff that was turned into RealPlayer or Windows Media Player streams or DVD video discs.)
... couldn't they do better than to also copy the user icons when they copied the feature? Sad. Now the duck has been replaced by big cats in Mac OS X.
> at the Mac OS screenshot? All I see is a blank
> square.
It's an interactive QuickTime movie, not a still image. You need QuickTime Player for Mac OS or Windows. There are still shots of Aqua on Apple's site as well.
(QuickTime is the Unix of multimedia, man
The top-right of Pocket Windows is just a re-implementation of the Windows taskbar and its System Tray, but put up on the top of the screen, where it reminds one of the Mac's Menubar and System Menus. The menubar in Mac OS X just looks like a prettier, more colorful menubar from previous Mac OS versions (same clock, same system menus).
I agree that Windows XP looks a little too much like Mac OS X, though. I don't mind that, but I thought that naming the Windows XP interface "Luna" was about the weakest and most lame thing I had ever heard. Aqua, introduced in January 2000, and it's ugly step-sister Luna, barfed up in mid-2001. Sad. They are named like they are two products from the same company, which I guess is Microsoft's idea of innovation and competition. I think they should at least pretend to be original. The number of eye-rolls I saw when "Microsoft Luna" was announced!
Microsoft also copied the multiple Login panel from Mac OS 9 for Windows XP, and that would have been fine, too, except that they used the exact same rubber ducky picture as one of the user icons. I mean, there are only a handful of default user icons (the user is meant to drag in their own pictures, at least in the Mac version)
> Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide PC Shipments
... you see that all the time. If it is the latter, then they could very well be number 6, with 4.5% of the market.
... they digested Digital, Alpha, and associated high-end Unixes, while charging Linux users for Windows. Now, THAT is how you get zero brand loyalty and get to watch your company's value disappear overnight. How much is HP/Compaq worth today? About as much as HP was worth a year ago.
...
Your post doesn't tell us anything.
Is that "Worldwide PC(-compatible) Shipments" or "Worldwide Personal Computer Shipments"? If it is the former, Apple won't even be included in these numbers
Shit, who cares, though, really? Apple has been profitable for over three years, has billions of dollars in the bank, makes the most popular pro DV-editing software, the most popular consumer DV-editing software, has the world's most advanced general-purpose operating system which will soon be the highest volume Unix, had an application base of over 10,000 apps BEFORE they tripled their developer base over the past year, just won an Emmy for inventing FireWire and revolutionizing the way broadcast video is created, has the cheapest (by far) pro-level DVD authoring solution, and the only consumer DVD authoring solution that is worth using. Also, they make computers.
Microsoft and their cartel can ship a trillion eMachines boxes and none of the above would change.
I do love to see Dell and Compaq promoted on Slashdot, though. You know how some people want to call Linux "GNU/Linux"? How about "MS/Dell" and "MS/Compaq"? Ha ha. Compaq is the worst
Apple's got the most commercially viable open source product since Apache, and there are geeks who are still promoting MS/Dell? C'mon
Comparing a Linux box and a Mac doesn't make any sense ... they have so few uses in common. Text editing, Web serving, and learning Unix ... is there any other field of endeavor where a Linux box and a Mac overlap?
... like it matters to Linux if it can do the things Mac OS X can do? No. Different uses, different priorities. It's only because both systems have displays and keyboards that they are compared at all. Do creative work on a Mac, build huge server and render farms with Linux. At all costs, avoid Windows. It is so straightforward.
I have Mac workstations and Linux servers. I can't imagine losing the ability to easily edit DV, work with media files in every format, make DVD's like floppies, just so I can trade a computer with an open source core OS and an incredible GUI and application platform for one that has an open source core OS. No knock to Linux implied or intended. I think it does Linux a disservice to compare it to Mac OS X
So a guy who spends his time copying other people's look and feel for different program finds a bug. Arguably a bug that millions of others would be able to find and probably already had reported to Apple. So he thinks Apple should give him rights to all their intellectual property? There is no irony here. If he wants to be paid to find bugs, he should get a job as a tester.
And this is why he was shutdown. Just read the FAQ on that page and you will see that he had a blue apple in his theme. I don't think this is look and feel at all. It's because he used the freakin LOGO is why he had his themes shutdown. In fact, I believe you can still get the Aqua like look in enlightenment and the like from Themes.org, just not the Apple logos.
Look and feel is ok, just don't use the TRADEMARKED logo.
Gorkman
Jobs is the pope and he can bite my arse. My favourite theme is fvwm2. Default.
I'll leave Islam out of it for now. Feel free to contribute.
:wq
I'm working on a cool multimedia tool. Apple
is lame attempting to lock people out of assimulating a decent theme. Well too bad Xerox
can sue thier ass for copying a window environment similar to thier own. This is why once my Multifli code gets out, I'll have a GPL, but I will lock it out of any use on OS/X.
Also Why don't we design a theme that rivals Aqua,
copyleft it, and make it illieagal for them to
assimulate it.
Apples days are numbered anyway. I have a multiplatform environment at home. I've got
a Apple 9600 running LinuxPPC (Firewall/Webserver/
Cable Modem/ NAT/IMAP email server), Apple G3 (Linux SMB server for house, icecast server), Dec Alpha (still trying to port more linux apps to this box), 486DX2 50 (My Linux based Mpeg
gateway for my Auto MPEG Player NE35, this allows me to have ethernet access to my MPEG player), MZ104 embedded controller based root w/wireless ethernet (My own design) And.. my Compaq 7100US
w 1.3GHZ Athlon and 256MB DDR RAM Linux box, everything is supported by the 2.4x kernel, including the DVD ROM and 1394 firewire. This box
is much faster then the Apple G4 that I had on lone. My kernel compile times are less than half the time taken with the G4. Yes the CPU speed is faster on the AMD, And the 7200RPM hard drives
aren't bad either. And.. the GFORCE Nvidia card.
So, go ahead apple. be a scrooge and put all your
eforts into preventing others from using a simular
desktop. What goes around comes around. You take
from the Open Source movement and you don't reciprocate. This is only going to have a negative
effect on you in the future.
There were two major problems with the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit.
1. Microsoft managed to worm around with a previous contract
2. Apple screwed up in a big way.
I did a report on it about 6+ years for a contracts class [no, I'm not a lawyer, civil engineering majors have to take a class on contracts]. From the summaries that I read, Microsoft had liscensed some bits from Apple for a previous version of Windows [2.0 ? Might have been 1.0], and when the next version came out, Apple sued them, as they didn't sign a new contract, so Apple would keep getting residuals.
Microsoft claimed [and primarily won], on their claim that the new version of windows was based on the old version of windows, which they had a contract from Apple for.
There were a few other points with specific issues, but Apple made the mistake of claiming that certain 'look and feel' elements were rip-offs of certain applications, and Microsoft pointed out that those items were a function of the Apple Finder, not the individual application, and so, the points didn't hold weight.
There were a few other items, such as Microsoft stating that an outline of an icon is fundamentally different from a shaded icon, window zooming animation was different, etc.
Basically, what this boils down to, to differentiate it from the MS case -- the designs are based on Aqua. They're based directly from Aqua, and at no time was there a contract giving permission for it.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
From where did you glean that? If you made it up, perhaps it should be Moofie's Corollary...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Firebaal ... I'm sorry, man, but you're really off-base here.
... eBay.com
... don't think of the hardcore gamer, think of the average person who just wants to grab the Sims and play with it without worrying about how to install it (on the Mac, you just drag-and-drop or one-click to install).
Apple computers feature more support for standards than any other system. From the OpenFirmware (IEEE 1275) that boots the system to the PDF window server, every place where a standard component or protocol could be used, it is used. Hardware includes AGP, PCI (4 empty 64-bit slots in every PowerMac), DVI, VGA, ATA, SCSI, USB, FireWire (IEEE 1394), AirPort (802.11b), Gigabit Ethernet, etc. Software includes PDF and PostScript output from any application, WebDAV, UFS, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DV capture and editing, viewing of every common graphics format, playback of every common audio format, DVD-R and CD-RW data burning, CD to MP3 ripping, DVD video disc authoring, DVD video disc playback, Java2, QuickTime, Apache, Perl, 5.1 surround sound, 32-bit float audio (the first OS to support this pro audio format), MIDI, mLAN, ColorSync, Cocoa (OpenStep), Carbon (support for traditional pc apps like MS Word and Macromedia Dreamweaver), BSD Unix. This is all off the top of my head. Go to apple.com and check it out.
> Pricewatch.com
You might think that there is no Mac software or hardware, but you are wrong. The hardware is most of the same stuff you use on Windows, but on the Mac it is easy to install and you don't need drivers (Apple collects them now and ships them with the OS so stuff just works). Excluding games, the software is 75% the same as Windows (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Word, Excel, etc) and often comes in the same box, and there are equivalents for the other 25% (Apache instead of IIS, Final Cut Pro instead of EditDV, Java2 instead of C#, etc). For games, you just get the hits (Tony Hawk 2, Alice, Sims, Quake III, etc), and sometimes about six months later, but you usually also get additional features and less bugs. It's fine for a lot of people
> This is why IBM Compatible computers have the
> majorty of the computer market
IBM-compatible computers have the majority of the market because that's what Microsoft runs its operating systems on, and Microsoft does whatever it takes to get a majority of the market. All the things that we hear about now that Bill Gates is a celebrity have been going on since day one. In the DOS days, Microsoft stole code from Stacker, included it in MS-DOS, and put Stacker out of business. By the time the court case was done, all the software in question was obsolete and Stacker stayed out of business. There are a thousand stories like that.
Mozilla is no different and was primarily motivated to go XP because native widgets couldn't do what the CSS specs demanded and that it was next to impossible to produce an decent XP frontend around them. And while this has lead to a few speed bumps on the way, it's turned out to be a good thing. The vast majority of Mozilla is now totally cross-platform and skinnable and most of the time you'd never know you weren't using native widgets.
It is for this reason you'll never see Mozilla use native widgets again. There are some vestiges of native widget support still in CVS but it's so bit rotten it would never work. In fact the only way you'll ever see an Aqua Mozilla is if:
Either option is quite likely to happen at some point. I don't see why Apple would get funny if Mozilla had an "official" aqua like theme just as IE does.
Me too! All of these Apple appology posts are just amazing. What this says is that you can't make your computer look like what YOU want it to. I don't want to look like Aqua, but Eric Yang does and did. His buddies might like that too, but Eric has been forbiden to share the results of his work by a company that is afraid it will loose revenue that way! BOGUS.
Let's take this priciple to it's logical extreem, shall we. Will it become forbiden to have "windows" with an X, a box, and a line on them? Will it become forbiden to make windows slied up into a bar with a title? Where does it end? With 75 year IP half lives, it might become imposible to make your computer look like anything because some squatter bought the IP and might loose revenue. "Look and feel" is not well defined.
If look and feel is all that Apple has got, it does not have much. If this is what they do with what they have, I hope the don't do anything cool in the future.
Bad Apple, bad! Fix this now.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Want some cheese to go with that whine? Didn't this guy steal all the widgets from Omniweb?
How much helping of writing a library did you do? Bug-fixes shouldn't count. I think Apple is great with developers in OS X, short of bringing out Steve Ballmer to chant it. I wouldn't expect Apple to lend a hand with Mozilla, they have not a lot of interest in it.
As for Mozilla with an Aqua UI - it's a great idea - check out http://sourceforge.net/projects/qbati2/
Unless I'm completely wrong (which is entirely possible; I have a cold and it's early) you cannot *copyright* a design or a layout. And even if you did, only a direct copy would be infringing.
You can *trademark* certain symbols, phrases, or whatever that help differentiate your product, but I sincerely doubt that you can trademark an entire look and feel. For instance, if the theme developers used the Apple logo in their themes that would obviously be trademark infringement.
But if they just make green red and amber buttons, and themes that look like Apple themes I think they have some ground to stand on. Pontiac can make their cars look like Ford cars if they want, but they can't put Ford's logo on them. And these themes aren't even being sold.
I'm not saying that Apple is behaving like an evil dictator or anything, only that it's not a black and white case.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
You mean 'did better on one meaningless test club'
copyright the themes as GPL too...and when Apple finally gets their own theming engine, sue them with anything that looks familiar.
Not many people know this but if you get Xfree86 installed on an OS X system, you can compile and run your standard GTK/QT apps. One of the nice things about having Aqua themes for GTK et all is that your applications running under OS X will all look the same. Now I guess all those OS X users will be walking advertisements for Enlightenment instead of Apple.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Photographer A captures a breath-taking picture of a sunsite behind some buildings. Photographer B sees the picture and thinks that was he would like to take the same picture and after several weeks of waiting was able to get a picture that was almost identical to the original(you would have to compare them side by side to see the differences..)
Did photographer B violate A's copyright.. no it was created independently... Was B inspired by A, yes. does this violate copyright, no.. Same thing with apple, just because you inspire a copy of a work, does not be that it infringes on the copyright of that work.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
You don't have to sit behind a one-way mirror and watch a user rip the result of the last 3 months of your life to shreds.
That sounds interesting, if you are a lingerie designer.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
> if I make fried chicken for my friends and family
... no special treatment. You can make 50 different Aqua skins and keep them on 20 different computers all around your house and it's not illegal. In this case, Apple asked the guy not to put an Aqua skin for X-Windows out on the Web, not to turn in his technology and surrender his human dignity.
> with the 11 herbs and spices similar to Kentucky
> Fried Chicken's batter recipe , based on my
> experience with the Colonel's product,
... then that would be fine. I think the problem here is actually analagous to creating a perfect imitation of the distinctive red and white KFC bucket, and then sending the plans and images out over the Internet so that people can print and fold and serve their own chicken to the family in a cool KFC bucket. Or so they can order a cheaper brand of take-out chicken, and still put it in the bucket. These buckets look like KFC buckets, with the signature imprint, but they always contain non-KFC chicken. I can see how KFC would like it better if you just came up with your own bucket design and distributed that instead.
Another analogy would be if you were making car bodies of BMW cars that fit over some other kind of car and made them look like BMW's. The people at BMW would have to be like, WTF?
What if you made shells for Dell notebooks that made them look like PowerBooks? Would it be understandable for Apple to ask you not to do that anymore?
> then KFC-
> Pepsico lawyers can come to my employer and
> demand that he seize the hd on my laptop and
> discover if I am storing their
Didn't Apple just ask him to not skin Aqua? I didn't see anything about threatening anybody's employer or taking computers. Presumably, he could go ahead and release the skin and then they would have to take him to court if they thought it was worth it. Then they ask the next guy not to make a skin and they can point out that they also asked this guy
Artistic freedom would be inventing your own theme that was as creative and unique as Aqua, not implimenting a copy of someone else's creative content on another system.
People have always had their 'opinions' on what should be called 'art'.
When Van Gogh and the other impressionists started painting, the cultural-elite stated that since it didn't involve months and months of work, it realy wasn't art at all.
And now you are stating that since it imitades something that already exists, it isn't art ??
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
This seems like the least outrageous example of corporatism ever discussed on Slashdot. We're talking about a Bay Area technology company founded and run by a bearded vegan asking a "free software" Linux user not to distribute his clone of the public face of a nascent product that is perhaps the most mainstream open source project ever.
How diabolical.
No wonder nobody fully believes the truth about Microsoft when free software people also see Apple as the enemy. Trying to pretend like Apple and Microsoft are even playing in the same league of evil is a joke. Like the subject line implies, Apple is not even as evil as Adobe. Give me a break.
What this guy should do is make a distinctive skin of his own and give it over to his favorite distro so they can make it their default, and give Mandrake Linux or whatever a face that says "Mandrake Linux". Ask yourself for a second whether Apple might have a good tactic for introducing new technology even to Windows users.
Copyrights only apply to a specific instance & medium of a work.
Trademarks apply to a specific design, logo, or name.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Much better example, thank you.
So, you've got photographer B deliberately imitating photographer A's work as closely as possible, yet he didn't actually *copy* photographer A's photograph. Still guilty.
A similar example would be if author B really liked author A's work, so he produced an identical story. Same plot, same characters, same pretty damned near everything save for some slight wording differences. This is a pretty clear case of copyright violation, even though the copy wasn't exactly the same.
In both cases, artist A did the work, and artist B (one way or another) copied it and thereby profited from it. Copyright law exists to prevent other people from profiting off of your work without your permission.
IANAL, but I'm pretty confident that that's how a judge would rule in these two cases.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
My wife came back from shopping today with a tiny version of WC seat for our son. You know, that stuff you put on a normal WC seat, so that the little boy doesn't fall in. :-)
I turned it around, and to my surprise read "protected by copyright and patent rights" or something like that. Go figure?! I REALLY wonder what's left to "inovate" on a piece of plastic meant to sit on it and shit???
Want another example? Well, I went to visit my oncle, and he showed me some wonder-medicine advertisement, which boldly stated: "This is a medicament which has been used in india for thousands of years" first, followed by US patent nr... Cool, hein?
Something is really badly wrong with both patent and copyright system...
Now, to the question "and how does this reflect to allpe aqua themes"? Well, I could agree that Apple put a lot of $$ in this design, and I could imagine that some aspects of "Aqua" interface could be protectable by copyright. I'm even displeased by the fact that someone calls his theme "Aqua", though I don't really think such words should be copyrightable....
However, IMHO the idea of owning the copyright on every GUI featuring translucent buttons is just as rediculous as patenting something which has been used for 2000 years, or a toilet seat, and should not be tolerated by the system.
Use some of that Panzer Kunst. You'll be fine.
Notice the source of that story? Why, it was Enzo Ferrari himself. No witnesses.
That story is considered largely fabricated. Oh sure, there is surely some element of truth to it, but the story is *known* to have grown and changed over the years. It isn't fact.
Also, the fact that it was the ensignia on the plane of a single individual dosn't mean it that *wasn't* the insignia on the planes of everyone else in his squadron. It was. It was the squadron insignia, not the private insignia of the individual.
Just as Eddie Rickenbacker had a hat in a ring on the side of his plane, so did *everyone else* in his squadron. Georges Guynemer had a stork. So did *everyone else* in his squadron.
If you're actually interested in this subject you ought to read Brock Yates' biography of Enzo.
KFG
Now see, you've made a common mistake of non professionals.
You can't copyright the horse, you have to *patent* it.
Sheesh, get it right.
KFG
> Hell, I'd love to have a Mac at my home, but
... Java2, Cocoa, Carbon, BSD, Perl, AppleScript (this is recordable scripting of GUI apps and documents with plain English syntax that you save as applications), HTML/JavaScript, QuickTime, WebObjects, CGI, whatever.
> not for a price that would make my parents broke!
Desktops start at $799 and include OS X, an optical mouse, display, FireWire, speakers, AirPort antennas (to act as a base station for notebooks), etc. Notebooks start at $1299 and are subnotebook-sized, and include OS X as well as FireWire, built-in AirPort (802.11b) antennaes, 5-hour battery. You also get the best consumer movie-editing software, digital camera software, excellent CD/MP3 ripping/burning software. Really good stuff that you'll enjoy using. Also a creatively-oriented office suite and a few really good games. You can't tell me that's not cheap.
> For example, why did Apple limit all the licensing
> agreements so noone could manufacture a Mac
> clone?
Steve Jobs said it was because the world doesn't need another Compaq. Turns out we didn't even need the one we already had.
> But the only thing they've returned back is the
> kernel, which is of very little practical use
They returned back a complete open source Unix called Darwin. It runs on Macs and on x86. It is great for standard things like Apache and Perl, and also includes QuickTime Streaming Server for serving streaming video. You can run X-Windows on there if you like. It is a very big hunk of Mac OS X (about 150MB). People are buying OS X for their current Mac, and putting Darwin on the old Mac they had in the closet and using it as a development server at zero cost. If they have a compatible Intel machine, they can use that, too (seeing "Welcome to Macintosh!" on an x86 system was a real trip the first time.) Apple have also returned changes to compilers and such, and hired open source developers to work on Darwin and BSD. They also opened code for gaming controllers.
Shipping millions of computers with Mac OS X on them also puts Apache, Perl, emacs, BSD Unix onto computers that kids commonly find in their homes and schools. Lots of kids will use Apache rather than IIS because all Macs now ship with this great, great software. You can also do and learn a bunch of different developer stuff on Mac OS X
I'll leave it to you to detail Microsoft's attitude towards open source, seeing as Microsoft is Apple's main competitor. I mean, think about it.
> I'm sure it's fine by them as long as they've got
> their revenue.
What a bizarre attitude to take about Apple. Are you sure you're not thinking about Microsoft? Microsoft uses BSD-licensed code as well, you know, but they don't advertise it and they don't give anything back at all, from what I understand. Further to that, they have called open source software a cancer and un-American and other such ridiculous propagandist terms.
People who contributed to BSD Unix and Apache and all the other fine community software are to be thanked and respected for their efforts, but so are the coders at Apple who developed other aspects of a modern computer platform. So are the financial people at Apple who found a way to give so much value, take so many risks, and still keep the company so healthy. This stuff is so cheap, and it's so good. Every new app that arrives only makes it even better.
I sure hope not... even if I used his photographs to determine how to best frame my photograph, and especially if I didn't.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Until Linux folks understand basic principles of GUI design and are willing to accept widget layouts based on principles of cognitive psychology and not on "because it looks cool" or "Windows does it", we are all far better off with linux looking plain butt ugly. I have gotten really, really sick of many developers in both KDE and GNOME being only concerned with aesthetics and making the ultimate critera for good GUI design being "it looks perty". If I had a dollar for every absolutely beautiful set of themed widget laid out in the most confusing and usuable manner possible, I could hire both desktop environments teams of competant HCI professionals. It might be far better that potential linux converts won't have aesthetically pleasing themes that might suck them into a world software with even less usability than Windows. Maybe a lack of attractive themes would force the linux desktop environments to focus on areas of the GUI that really count in a user getting their work done. A macintosh from 10 years ago is still more usable than tonights build of GNOME or KDE. And it's far, far less pretty. Themes? Prettiness? A really GUI programmer craves these things not.
From MacNN.com:
Apple has apparently worked things out with Eric Yang, whom we earlier today reported was prevented from developing an Aqua front-end for Mozilla and Netscape: "What Apple objected to was not Aquafying Mozilla, but rather the way I was doing it via emulation, thus not giving Mozilla users a pure Aqua experience. Apple is willing to provide information for creating real Aqua experience for Mozilla. Right now, my efforts are focused on an Aqua interface for Tenon's iTools, so work on Mozilla for the moment is in abeyance."
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Cool there...you know, the internet doesn't do a good job of expressing tone of voice. The paragraph you quoted of me was satire or sarcasm. I don't really believe it, rather I said it to show how silly the idea was.
Sorry for the confusion.
Oh Oh
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun