ROI in OSS (was: GIMP 2.2 splash screen ...)

Randy Edwards redwards at golgotha.net
Sun Dec 5 15:52:01 EST 2004


 > there have been many "look and feel" lawsuits over the years, and most
 > of them have been *won* by the "bad guys":

   That's an odd good/bad terminology.  Suffice it to say I'm in favor of 
saying there is no such thing as a copyrightable look and feel, and the 
courts have pretty consistently held that view.

 > SEA Software vs. PKWare  (arc vs. pkarc)
 > http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONTROVERSY/LAWSUITS/SEA/
 
   I would dispute that site's characterization of the suit.  I was heavily 
involved in the FidoNet at that time, was a longtime Arc user who happily 
switched to PKArc to gain the extra few percent of compression it'd give (I 
had the RAM to spare, so...).

   While the documentary site claims there were many issues involved, the only 
one I recall at the time was one of simple code piracy.  In that, in my view, 
there was no doubt.  I knew one person who was called to the trial as an 
expert witness, and many people who looked at the code; they reported that 
there was a large amount of temporary variable names and code that were just 
identical.  To me, it was a simple case of pirating someone's code, and 
despite that the Arc source code was available, it was shareware and was not 
public domain.

   There's no doubt the backlash killed Arc (the extra compression and 
performance of PKArc had already stuck several knives in it), but from a 
legal standpoint, I don't see any big controversy.

 Regards,
 .
 Randy

-- 
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, 
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who 
are cold and are not clothed." -- US President Dwight D. Eisenhower




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