Re: Pending Litigation

[Robert J . Slover]

On Thursday, Aug 28, 2003, at 11:56 America/Indianapolis, John Anderson wrote:

> I want my "freedom" to use GNUstep more firmly established.
>
> So, to clarify status of GNUstep in terms of intellectual property law, I am preparing to file a lawsuit against Apple Computer, Inc. in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division.
>
> In lay terms, I will be seeking a declaration from the Court that GNUstep does not infringe on any rights that Apple Computer may have and to the extent that it does, Apple has granted GNUstep an irrevocable license.

In lay terms, you are provoking an argument where none exists.

I responded to your first post in an attempt to clarify things, I did it "off-list" because I didn't want to be part of a long discussion.  I don't have a lot of time at present.  Really, I should be sleeping now since I am leaving on a 14 hour drive in 2.5 hours.  Quite frankly, I was irritated when you CC'd my post to the list...I did not have time to research and provide substantiation for my assertions, or I would have done so and posted it to the list myself.

The subsequent discussion has led me to think variously that you are a) just confused, b) a crank/troll, c) an "astroturfer" trying to stir things up, etc.  I still don't know what to think, actually.  I spent a little while researching, but nothing definite.  I do think you are who you say you are (e.g., not an astroturfer), but make no solid conclusions beyond that.  Your arguments are so confused I wanted to find out what you were like elsewhere.  For those with some time:

"John Anderson" is a common name, so difficult to search for...I found several postings on COCOADEV archives with his current address, going back only a few months.  I found one signed "John Philip Anderson" http://cocoa.mamasam.com/COCOADEV/2003/03/2/59917.php .  This is a little more to go on.  Reading through some of the hits there reveals John is involved in getting a Cocoa plotting library together, and possibly with forward porting HippoDraw to Cocoa.  It also revealed a recent discussion in which someone on the list was politely warned by an Apple engineer to refrain from discussing some API features currently under NDA for Panther.  Perhaps this triggered John's present paranoia? Anyway, googling for the full name revealed this posting: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/russ/visad/msg14556.html , with some very useful information embedded in it.  I also found that John was very active with the w3c "Jigsaw" project.  All of this is positive stuff.  Anyway, using some of that embedded information, I was able to determine that John is active in his community (again, good stuff).  However, not all of the information there is positive, this one at least: http://www.inghamcrc.org/July%2011,%202002.htm casts some doubt on his veracity.  From that, my opinion could fall either way.  That is as far as I got.  I did notice that sometimes he is listed as "John T. Anderson" in these minutes, though with the exact same address.

John, I choose to believe that you have a concern, but that you are very confused in believing that GNUStep might infringe copyright.  To infringe copyright, you have to make a duplicate or translation of something original.  In the case of the OpenStep spec, that is the spec itself.  The rules are really fuzzy, in that a copyright holder can set terms for distribution (in effect, relaxing the copyright restrictions without losing them totally) and the spec does that...allowing single copies to be retained for study by individuals.  I know that thing is archived all over the web, so that is probably infringement, but my personal copy is on paper and came from NeXT years ago.  As far as the method and class names themselves, those are an *interface*, just like the buttons and windows on the screen that Microsoft prevailed with in court.  Additionally, the rule for copyright on code (as I understand it) is that there must be a plurality of methods of implementation to copyright the code.  (I think this is a bit bogus, but it is common).  Anyway, for a library interface for a *compatible* library, there can be only one such interface (else it would not be compatible).  If you are worried that the copyright extends to the concepts, think of how quickly Ford and GM followed Chrysler in producing minivans.  Copying in science and industry is the norm, and society only grants authors a limited monopoly through copyright on artistic and creative works, as an exception to the norm.  

Beyond this, Apple would have to prove some damage to OpenStep from the implementation of GNUStep.  Not likely, since GNUStep is the only thing going that still attempts to adhere to this particular incarnation of the API -- and developers such as yourself, desiring a safety valve, are good counterexamples which prove that Apple benefits indirectly from GNUStep.  Few, if any, skip buying a Mac because they have GNUStep.  

You might attempt writing to Apple, if it still concerns you, but a lawsuit to get Apple to produce a license that GNUStep does not need is ludicrous.  The license mentioned in the spec would have been for OPENSTEP (the implementation), as I have always read it, which NeXT did indeed sell to Sun and probably to HP as well. Those were not new implementations, but ports (a translation, if you will) of the existing NeXT implementation.    Anyway,  I expect that Apple legal would give you the boilerplate "Apple will vigorously defend its property" if you write them.  This is exactly the right thing for paid lawyers to do, as they have enough battles to fight (e.g., someone suing them over the word "rendezvous") that they won't waste time researching the issue unless it *is* an issue, but they won't burn their bridges either by telling you it is OK.  It is a non issue.  Leave it that way.

Develop for GNUStep or don't.  Decide.  Take your risk, or leave it.  You are taking the exact same risk (in fact, a deeper one) by developing for Cocoa.  Iterations of this environment and similar API's have come and gone on various platforms now since the late 1980's, and this list and the net are littered with companies that gambled and lost developing for it.  Being able to deploy on NeXT/Sun/HP/Intel for a while there was a really big deal, but not for very long.  YellowBox demoed and died, and Apple is unlikely to resurrect it, as it does not make sense to do so.  If you were a developer depending on that, you lost.  You are subject to the whims of the platform maintainers, whether Cocoa, Java, Win32, or GNUStep.  As you said, you are "relatively new to programming professionally", well, this is part of it.  It is one of the factors that free software attempts to mitigate, but it is there nonetheless.

Best Regards,


--Robert