Re: GUI of Windows2001 (my gut reaction, then something for cons

[Paul Dorman <pdorman ihug co nz>]

Well for a start I find that somewhat strange. I thought it was not
possible to protect one's intellectual property rights regarding 'look
and feel'. This is the basis upon which both Apple and Microsoft got out
of lawsuits regarding the use of mouse driven "windows" type interfaces,
was it not?

A second thing I'd like to say is that the open source community, as
abhorent as the very concept may be, might be forced to secure
intellectual property rights over technology developed within the
community. The very minimum this would give would be leverage with
companies who would be prepared to do 'technology exchanges with the
community'. This should become more important as the open source
community starts to take a leadership role in the industry. Doesn't it
seem completely crazy to have particular things stripped away, or
particular technologies kept from us, when the people who claim the
moral high-ground for this are perfectly happy to use any developments
we come up with?

My vote is for some agency to be formed which purchases the intellectual
property rights for new technologies developed within the open source
community. This agency would make sure that the only people to benefit
from these technologies were open source projects. It would also
negotiate technology exchanges and licensing for various technologies
with other software producers.

I've mentioned this before and really feel that it's important for the
open source community to protect itself against exploitation, *and*
about the only effective defense against the open source revolution.
Let's say a project is developed to take the theming capability to the
level I described in my earlier post. MS would be quite happy to use
this open source technology on one hand, whilst obfuscating and ruining
open standards on the other hand with its embrace and extend policy. I
have no doubt also that open source projects, which typically have
little or no money will become tied up by jealous and litigious
companies. If we have no leverage, we'll be in big trouble.

Gnome is definitely gaining some attention, and perhaps one of the
companies wanting to help would be interested in sponsoring the
procurement of intellectual property rights on behalf of the technology
innovators and the open source community as a whole...

Best regards to all,
Paul Dorman.

Wellington, New Zealand.

Ali Abdin wrote:
 
> Oooh, there's a big problem right there. I just read on LinuxToday that the
> KDE project has had Copyright issues with GUI's and they were forced to
> take away their Mac theme from KDE2.0 development. And the Mac theme has
> disappeared from kde.themes.org. If that wasn't enough - Mac has
> trademark'd the "trash" statement so you can't use that as the "Recycle
> Bin" or whatever you wanna call it :P