Re: Spring Loaded Folders Reloaded

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 05:08:47PM +0100, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> > 
> > However, looking at the Apple latest patent [1], it is clear that the 
> > patch would make Nautilus violates claim 1 of that patent.
> 
> To my eyes, the more sensible thing to do with respect to patent is to
> never read any so that you can say you didn't know about it if there is
> some problems :)

Unfortunately, that doesn't work. i.e. if you are sued, "I didn't
know" is not a permitted legal defense. "I didn't know" can only 
reduce the damages you have to pay.

> Moreover, this apple patent is probably valid in a few countries, and I
> don't think it's really fair to reject this patch because it's illegal
> in the us (and maybe a few other countries). You can #ifdef it out in
> the problematic countries if you want to be safe :)

It's not good enough - companies can't ship patented source code *at
all* - for mp3 support for example, Red Hat must unpack the tarball, 
remove the support, and repack the tarball. We can't use a patch to
disable it.

Havoc