Re: Does GNUstep infringe on Apple's Intellectual Property?

[Adam Fedor]

On Sun, 2003-08-24 at 20:34, Tima Vaisburd wrote:
> On Sunday 24 August 2003 17:13, John Anderson wrote:
> 
> > I mean, it appears clear to me that GNUstep is a derivative work
> > that must violate Apple's copyrights on OpenStep and Cocoa.
> 

First of all,  "Intellectual Property" is a very ambiguous term (which
is probably why companies like using it :-)) which covers a whole range
of disparate laws such as copyright law, patents, trademarks, etc.

Second, I can provide my opinion on many issues, but nothing is ever
decided until it goes to court, so the whole issue might come down to
"what is my exposure" if Apple did decide to sue GNUstep or any company
that used GNUstep products.

For instance, several years ago, a company wanted to sell GNUstep as a
package (i.e. with a computer). They received several nasty letters from
Apple, although it didn't appear that they had any reasonable claim to
stop the distribution (not that that matters now days).

However, if a company wrote an OSX program and it just happened to
compile on GNUstep as well, what could they say?


> I presume that GNUstep is an independent, from-scratch implementation
> of the OpenStep API that has been published as open API, i.e.
> anybody can write it's own implementation.
> 

Yes, GNUstep is written from scratch, from the OpenStep API, although we
incorporate extensions (i.e. Cocoa) that aren't part of the OpenStep
API. Even so, copying an application interface is not necessarily a
copyright violation (this has been tested in court before, although a
long time ago). At worst we could just changes the names of everything
(and then have someone provide a script that changed the names back
again). I think we are reasonably safe here. 

There is also the "look and feel"-type lawsuits. Apple has been fairly
aggressive here against people writing Aqua themes (not related to
GNUstep). (GNUstep's stated goal is more of a NeXTStep look).

Apple also has several patents on OpenStep technology, which they
clearly haven't enforced (e.g. pressing tab to go to the next view in
the responder chain). They also have several patents on EOF methods,
which although they seem to have prior art, probably have more merit,
and are very difficult to work around. We haven't really resolved the
questions related to EOF yet.


Of course, anyone can get the general "Cease-and-desist" letter. Heck,
if SCO can sue IBM for code as generic as allocating memory in a Unix
kernel, who isn't vulnerable to the same sort of ploy? The best we could
do is find a reasonable work-around to the problem that didn't involve
stopping work on GNUstep.


* OSX, Cocoa, EOF, Unix, OpenStep, and many other words in this e-mail
are registered trademarks of their respective owners  :-)