-----Original Message----- From: James Devine <jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
At 07:56 p.m. 5/20/98 -0400, Michael H. wrote:
>the time to stop Microsoft was when it copied Apple's operating
>system...Apple took Microsoft to court in what was known as the
>'look & feel' lawsuit...Apple said it looks like ours, it feels
>like ours, it is ours...Apple lost...Microsoft should have
>been forced to make their own...
-I understand that Apple got _its_ OS from a Stanford/government venture -that (I believe) was called SPARC.
Apple stole the look and feel (and a key designer) from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) which also pioneered the use of the mouse, windowed environments, word processing and other innovations on the personal computer.
In turn, most of those innovations like the mouse and windowed environments were first pioneered at Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center, which was funded by the federal government to the tune of millions of dollars a year in the 1960s and was one of the key centers which launched the Internet back in 1969.
So actually, the federal government should sue Microsoft for back royalties and be done with the matter :)
(Just kidding, the whole "look and feel" copyright idea is the worst threat to free speech and open computing imaginable.)
--Nathan