Comments on: Idiotic Apple

By: Bogdan Bivolaru

Bogdan Bivolaru — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:00:13 +0000

patenting the Dock… M$ once tried to get one for the double click

M…soft actually got one patent for their ribbon interface - Office 2k7 - not that I’m using it anyhow.

By: Sense Hofstede

Sense Hofstede — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:59:37 +0000

I’ve always found the way the patent system of the USA works. This really makes it worse. What a non-sense. Lets see if Emerald can get a patent on window borders with opacity!

By: Peng’s links for Friday, 10 October « I’m Just an Avatar

Peng’s links for Friday, 10 October « I’m Just an Avatar — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:53:05 +0000

[...] Forenza: Idiotic Apple. Another cross post from the Ubuntu Weblogs, but Apple has received a patent for their dock. AWN [...]

By: flows

flows — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:24:07 +0000

If it wasn’t that sad about global patent systems, I’d probably laugh at them (patenting the Dock… M$ once tried to get one for the double click :D)

By: andrewsomething

andrewsomething — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:16:20 +0000

So far the folks on the debian-legal list serve don’t see much of a threat: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2008/10/msg00006.html

From a response to that post:

“FWIW, the patent is more about zooming docks like the OSX one than plain
docks. I don’t know how the different claims are to be understood
individually, but some are detailing the zoom factors with algebraic
formulas.
IANAL, but patents are not supposed to “protect” ideas, but
implementations. It is at least true in the hardware industry. It often
happens that companies circumvent competitor patents by implementing the
same idea in another way, sometimes even filing a patent for the new
implementation.
Maybe different implementations of the same idea would be fine.”

By: Julian

Julian — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:52:06 +0000

I read about this on slashdot and people there kept wondering about the strange patent Apple filed. AWN and Cairo Dock probably won’t be affected by this as Apple was so uncommonly specific that it apparently only protects the Apple Dock from 1:1 copies.

Part of the specs are for example the _exact_ relations in size.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,434,177.PN.&OS=PN/7,434,177&RS=PN/7,434,177

I think we’re pretty safe on this one.

On a side note, I’m not a very big Apple fan myself but we shouldn’t forget about their OpenSource contributions of the last couple of years.

http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html

By: Nicolás

Nicolás — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:47:25 +0000

I saw on youtube the Steve Jobs’s stanford talk, and i loved it!

By: Stefano Forenza

Stefano Forenza — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:42:13 +0000

Forgot: I am not a “dock” user myself.