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

[Luciano Montanaro]

El Thursday 27 May 2004 11:53, Koos Vriezen escribió:
> On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 11:14:36AM +0200, David Faure wrote:
> > On Thursday 27 May 2004 11:13, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> > > On Wed May 26 2004 21:52, K?vin 'ervin' Ottens wrote:
> > > > 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...
> > > >
> > > > Of course we can revert those patches or modify them so that we don't
> > > > infringe this patent.
> > > 
> > > Please do so. Knowingly infringing a patent creates big liability issues for
> > > everyone involved.
> > 
> > Hmm, so we should get rid of the trash can too?
> > (I thought this was a Xerox patent, not a Mac patent, BTW. At least Xerox had
> > prior art for sure)
> > 
> > How about asking Apple "is it ok that we implement spring loading"?
> > Or how about finding a way to have it that doesn't infringe on the patent?
> > "Just reverting" looks a bit extreme to me.
> 
> Btw, isn't this a US versus the free world issue? (I know EU will be non free
> soon too, but everyone involved particularly mentioned things like a progress
> slider could not be patented).
> Why do I have to suffer from overseas laws (esp. those that doubtfully will hold
> in court)?
> IMHO let apple ask KDE to remove it.
> 
> Koos

I am not a lawyer, and even if I were, legislation differs in various parts of 
the world. It also seems to get worse and worse all over the world for us, 
but that is another story.

However, since the kde group distributes source code only, *we* should be safe 
enough. At least, the freetype and lame people think to be safe, under the 
assumption that only an executable file can infringe the patent. I think also 
that people is allowed trying out the patented algoritms for their own study, 
or scientific purposes.

So I think we are allowed to try out the patent-covered things, as long as we do 
not distribute binaries.

To make life easier to packageres, maybe the default configure script should 
disable features that may be patented. The packagers could check if patents are 
valid in their target market, and enable the features if they feel safe.

On our side, we could try to check if the features could be implemented 
without breaking patents. Maybe slightly changing the behaviour is enough.

We are already infringing the progress bar patent in a number of places,
however... so I'm not sure we'll be able to do anything at all, in a few years :(

Luciano