Re: Question about Cocoa/Gnustep

[Marciano Siniscalchi]

Folks (and Greg in particular)

first of all, I did not mean to start a diatribe on patents, enforceability, 
etc. That stuff is best left to Slashdot / OSNews / ... That said:

> When you own a patent it is *up to you* to find infringement and enforce
> it. This comes with a few caveats.  If you *know* that someone is
> infringing and you do nothing about it, then you have failed to press your
> patent rights and might loose your monopoly on the invention.

Not sure about this. E.g. Eolas tried to enforce their patent vs. Microsoft, 
but not vs. the Mozilla foundation, etc. In general, one hears a lot of 
discussion of "submarine patents" these days; if what you assert was true 
universally, then I guess this would be a non-issue. So perhaps there are 
some caveats here. 

> What was patented, in the case of TrueType is the "hinting" mechanism.
> FreeType got around this issue by coming up with an algorithm that doesn't
> rely on these hints, so there is no infringement.

My point exactly. They had to work around these issues---but this came at a 
cost in terms of rendering quality.

My overall impression is that patents *are* useful as "offensive" tools to 
large companies with deep pockets---if Microsoft or Apple sue me for patent 
infringement, I just do not have the resources to litigate, even if I might 
have some chance of disputing their claims. This is precisely what companies 
like Microsoft routinely threaten to do---I remember such threats in 
connection with Samba. More vague threats have also been made in connection 
with Mono, the free implementation of the .NET framework---and this has lead 
to endless discussions on OSNews as to whether or not it would be a good idea 
to adopt .NET as the "next-generation" dev platform for the Gnome project.

Anyway, I also happen to believe that it would be in Apple's best interest to 
actively support GNUstep as a cross-platform development tool. But I may be 
the only one to hold this belief...

Sorry if this (luckily short) thread "polluted" the quality of this list. 
Actually, I was honestly curious as to whether Apple had any sort of official 
position on GNUstep.

Best,
M
-- 
Marciano Siniscalchi     Ph  (847) 491-5398
Department of Economics  Fax (847) 491-7001
Northwestern University
http://www.faculty.econ.northwestern.edu/faculty/siniscalchi