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> I guess only free software can buck the commercial mandate enough to do that now. [spoiler] Here is fresh story to learn: OCAD (commercial app) VS OpenOrient

• danShumway 6y ago
  Is this a problem? First, it is good that software feature ideas aren't copyrightable. Arguably many of them shouldn't even be patentable. That means that yes, proprietary apps can look at your software and say, "that's cool, we should do that too." But it also means that people can write Open Source software that takes lessons from proprietary apps. We want software devs working on productivity tools and practical software to copy each other, we don't want everyone to reinvent the wheel all the time. I mean, heck, can you imagine if Finale came out with a new feature and that was just it, no other competitors or Open Source apps like MuseScore were allowed to offer that feature? Can you imagine trying to build a piece of software like Blender in that world, where Autodesk had a monopoly on "things that a 3D editor can do?" Second, 9 years to clone a feature in the world of software is a really long time. If you can launch a piece of software and you have 9 years before other people start building similar things... I mean, what else do you even want at that point? If it takes 9 years for a dev to capitalize on a unique feature in their app, I don't think it's the eventual imitators that are the problem.
  • app4soft 6y ago
    > First, it is good that software [GUI/UI/UX ,- edit.] feature ideas aren't copyrightable. I may agree from FLOSS dev side (as I'm itself!), BUT there already was a lot of cases where UI/UX features "was copyrighted".[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer%2C_Inc%2E_v%2E_Microsoft_Corp%2E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer%2C_Inc%2E_v%2E_...
    • danShumway 6y ago
      Okay, but read the first section of that link: > The court ruled that, "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...". In the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit, Xerox also sued Apple alleging that Mac's GUI was heavily based on Xerox's. The district court dismissed Xerox's claims without addressing whether Apple's GUI infringed Xerox's. Apple lost all claims in the Microsoft suit except for the ruling that the trash can icon and folder icons from Hewlett-Packard's NewWave windows application were infringing. The lawsuit was filed in 1988 and lasted four years; the decision was affirmed on appeal in 1994, and Apple's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied. And then later on: > After the district court ruled in favor of Microsoft, Apple appealed the decision arguing that the district court only considered infringements on the individual elements of Apple's GUI, rather than the interface as a whole. The appeals court almost entirely affirmed the ruling of the district court, establishing that, "almost all the similarities spring either from the license or from basic ideas and their obvious expression... illicit copying could occur only if the works as a whole are virtually identical." I'm not going to say that copyright expansion isn't a problem, and in general I think that software patents are a giant problem. But surely the answer to that isn't to encourage more expansion or to treat competitors cloning good features like it's something to be avoided. We should be holding up cases like this as an example of why proprietary developers can't get monopolies on ideas, and we should be normalizing that way of thinking about software. It's not a problem if a proprietary app copies an interface idea from an Open Source app because interface and feature ideas are not copyrightable. We should reinforce in culture that already recognized legal standard whenever possible.
      • app4soft 6y ago