From: sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan)
Subject: Re: "official" FSF position on apple
Organization: Kithrup Enterprises, Ltd.
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 00:53:57 GMT

In article <DREIER.92Sep14154407@beirut.berkeley.edu> dreier@beirut.berkeley.edu (Roland Dreier) writes:
>Or is the FSF position on Apple perhaps less rational?

Or is perhaps your knowledge of the situation limited by your ablity to
think and read?

>I also am a little curious about FSF's position on Macintosh ports.  OK,
>Apple sued some people, and maybe that's not so good.  

Apple has sued uSoft and HP over "user-interface copyright violation."
Apple is claiming that any program that looks a certain way and acts a
certain way infringes on their "copyrights," and therefore falls under the
various protections provided for by the various copyright laws in the US and
other countries.

One of the implications of this is that a lot of what the FSF does would be
made illegal, if the argument is carried out to it's logical conclusion.

>But what differentiates
>USL's suit against UC Berkeley (BTW, even though I may be a grad student
>at UCB, I have/had nothing to do with BSD Unix (or whatever you want to call
>it), I'm just a disinterested bystander) from Apple's suits?  

You are not only disinterested, you're also terribly ignorant of apparantly
all of the issues involved.

USL is suing BSDI and UCB, claiming that the Net/2 tape contains copyrighted
(or trade-secret-protected) USL code.  Naturally, the BSDI and UCB folks
disagree, and I tend to agree with them.  At the moment, however, USL is not
claiming that any code that looks and acts like UNIX is subject to their
control, despite what a lot of other ignorant people seem to think.  The
worst possible interpretation of USL's actions is that, since the Net/2 code
was developed as partial-replacements of the USL/AT&T code, line by line at
times, then the code is based up or otherwise derived from USL/AT&T code,
and therefore falls under USL's copyright.  I diagree with that assertion,
as well, but USL has *not* claimed that.  Yet, at least.  Anyone who wants
to can read the papers on uunet (ftp.uu.net:~ftp/vendors/bsdi/usl) and see
what USL has claimed so far.

If/when USL claims that code that contains no portion of USL's code falls
under USL's copyright, then there may be something to worry about, and a
reason to call for a boycott of USL -- although calling for a boycott of
AT&T long distance would be far more likely to be noticed and acted upon,
since AT&T is a majority holder of USL.

As for why the FSF is not endorsing any apple ports:  Apple is in business
to make money.  Apple makes money by selling hardware; they do not sell
software, except as a secondary thought.  By porting GNU utilities, such as
emacs or gcc, to the Macintosh, you are helping to encourage people to get a
Macintosh, and, therefore, are helping to support Apple's evil, litiguous
ways.

-- 
Sean Eric Fagan  | "You can't get lost in one room, no matter how
sef@kithrup.COM  |  little effort you make to learn your way around."
-----------------+    -- William E Davidsen (william@crd.GE.COM)
Any opinions expressed are my own, and generally unpopular with others.
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss