[ANNOUNCE] Spring loading folder behaviour (bad news inside)

[ismail d önmez]

Well Mplayer does MPEG encoding/decoding which is patented by hell lots of companies but I did not see any company suing Mplayer developers. 

Also as you pointed out Apple uses Khtml and also Kjs. So I do not think they would sue you or KDE project.

/ismail

-----Original Message-----
From: K?vin 'ervin' Ottens <ervin at ipsquad.net>
To: kfm-devel at kde.org
Date: Wed, 26 May 2004 21:52:31 +0200
Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Spring loading folder behaviour (bad news inside)

Hello,

Since nobody objected, I commited this new feature... It's now available in 
HEAD.

Sadly it seems that this feature is covered by a patent owned by Apple. This
was pointed to me on #kde-devel just during my commit. I find this really 
disgusting... I've then found that they even patented the trashcan icon... 
It's real shame.

Of course we can revert those patches or modify them so that we don't infringe 
this patent. I tend to think that it should stay like this for two reasons :
1) the possible modification is to never open new window when the spring 
loading is triggered, which won't honor the user setting "open one window by 
folder when browsing"
2) Apple reuse khtml for their Safari browser and then we can't do spring 
loading folder, have a trashcan and what else?

I know it's not legal reasons at all... My only concern is : can they harm the 
KDE project as a whole for this? or they'll sue me directly?

The later is acceptable to me... but harming the KDE project is not.

Regards.
-- 
K?vin 'ervin' Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net
"Ni le ma?tre sans disciple, Ni le disciple sans ma?tre,
Ne font reculer l'ignorance."