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Not really, they'll pay off Apple. Who it will really hurt is start ups that don't have the money to license. If APIs are held to be copyrightable and not subje
by tankenmate 11y ago
Not really, they'll pay off Apple. Who it will really hurt is start ups that don't have the money to license. If APIs are held to be copyrightable and not subject to fair use then this will lead to reduced innovation in the US. A similar ruling in Germany went the other way and stated that APIs are functional and hence not copyrightable.
- bitmapbrother 11y agoApple doesn't need the money. What they do need, however, is developer lock in which is probably non negotiable.
- andybak 11y agoHowever there is probably a quid pro quo somewhere in there that will give Microsoft leverage. So the previous point still stands, with one minor modification. The giants will come to terms and the small-fry will be screwed.
- bitmapbrother 11y agoSteve Jobs thought the same thing when he showed Bill Gates the Macintosh OS for the first time.
- andybak 11y agoHardly the same. Apple wasn't a 'giant' then, neither really was Microsoft. The tech landscape is very different now.
- bitmapbrother 11y agoI disagree. Apple and Steve Jobs learned an important lesson from that "quid pro quo" meeting with Bill Gates that they'll never ever forget. reply
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lightbritefight 11y agoGood thing he had copied it wholesale from Xerox PARCs first. Saved them both some time.
- bitmapbrother 11y agoYour history is incorrect, though. Apple was authorized by Xerox PARC to use their technology in exchange for allowing Xerox to buy 100,000 shares in Apple before their IPO.
- hga 11y agoI would use the word "concepts" rather than technology, although I'm sure there was some of that as well. The general UI, though, came from Douglas Engelbart's late '60s oN-Line System (NLS), the subject of the Mother of All Demos. Pretty much everything, windows, the mouse, just no graphics. It was much copied, e.g. I'm think the Lisp Machine had the same basic GUI working by the time work on the Apple Lisa started, it was certainly reliable and somewhat polished as of the fall of 1979/1980. If you're a student of this sort of history, it's a bit sobering how little "new" stuff we're really doing, it was all conceptualized and generally at least prototyped by the end of the '60s.