here is some analysis of the actual ruling in the apple v. microsoft case. please review it.
please note that it indicates that "[r]emarkably, neither the district court nor the Ninth Circuit ever resolved the ultimate question of real interest in look and feel cases. "
additionally the much-ballyhooed case was a resolution of the licensing dispute between apple and microsoft. apple didn't think that microsoft should be able to use any part of the mac desktop that they felt like. microsoft and the courts disagreed.
the most important bit of this is simply that the desktop metaphor is not defendable.
whether the overall look and feel of a product is defendable or not is not addressed by this ruling. just the desktop metaphor in the particular instanciation of windows 1.0-3.0 and the original mac desktop.
to the topic at hand, apple has dumped years of work into the widgets and engines that drive osx. they are not an open-source house. period. they don't have to be. i'm sorry if you don't agree, but there it is. they built it, somebody copied it.
open source or no, if you copied a term paper or cs class problem set from another student in college, you'd be tossed out on your ass.
yeah, the article was just the mpaa's take on the copy of the audio home recording act of 1992. here is the full text of the act. make your own decision as to how accurate their reading of it is. -p
Slashdot Mirror
here is some analysis of the actual ruling in the apple v. microsoft case. please review it.
please note that it indicates that "[r]emarkably, neither the district court nor the Ninth Circuit ever resolved the ultimate question of real interest in look and feel cases. "
additionally the much-ballyhooed case was a resolution of the licensing dispute between apple and microsoft. apple didn't think that microsoft should be able to use any part of the mac desktop that they felt like. microsoft and the courts disagreed.
the most important bit of this is simply that the desktop metaphor is not defendable.
whether the overall look and feel of a product is defendable or not is not addressed by this ruling. just the desktop metaphor in the particular instanciation of windows 1.0-3.0 and the original mac desktop.
to the topic at hand, apple has dumped years of work into the widgets and engines that drive osx. they are not an open-source house. period. they don't have to be. i'm sorry if you don't agree, but there it is. they built it, somebody copied it.
open source or no, if you copied a term paper or cs class problem set from another student in college, you'd be tossed out on your ass.
how is this so different?
yeah, the article was just the mpaa's take on the copy of the audio home recording act of 1992. here is the full text of the act. make your own decision as to how accurate their reading of it is. -p
like it sez up there. if you check the apple site for the specs on this here thingie, you'll find that it's got 2 usb ports built right in. handy.