Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 20:10:27 +0100
From: Alistair McMillan <alistair-at-amcmillan.f9.co.uk>
To: jr-at-jriddell.org
Subject: A little correction.

> Computer interface have long since been considered to be copyable. 
> Microsoft nicked Apple's.  Apple nicked Xerox's.  KDE and GNOME nick 
> from everyone.  It's how these things advance.  The nifty effect you 
> get when minimising a window in Mac OS X is patented.

I found your article on patents recently from a link on glasgownet.com.

Apple paid Xerox $1 million of shares in Apple in exchange for letting 
Apple pay two visits to their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to see 
the Smalltalk development system, not the Alto or Star machines that 
most people claim.  Apple's subsequent IPO increased the value of those 
shares to $17.6 million.

Also some of the people that worked at PARC were hired by Apple to work 
on the Macintosh, some pre-dating the PARC visits.  Some of these 
people had actually started work on their GUI ideas before they even 
arrived at PARC and some of the stuff that is attributed to the PARC 
people was actually developed when they were working at Apple.

In short Apple did not nick their GUI from Xerox.  Microsoft however 
had access to a few Macs so that they could develop a version of Office 
to run on the Mac, and they used that as the basis of their Windows UI. 
  Court documents prove that, including the $150 million Microsoft 
invested in Apple to make the court cases disappear.

That said, I do agree that software patents should not be allowed.

-- Alistair