On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Christopher Wright <[email protected]>wrote:
> The actual agreement when you install the Developer Tools is probably the >> most telling statement published statement about what you can or cannot do, >> and the language used is very broad. >> > > > There was limited discussion on this on the thread a bit earlier: > > > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg03571.html > > I would be surprised if apple-supplied virtual patches fell under different > protection, but stranger things have happened... > > lawsuits over "simple math" are what software patents are all about , btw > ;) Thanks for the link. Oh, I see I already replied on that, and it dead ends where I seek clarification on what exactly constitutes sample code. Is it only code in the Developer Folder, system code, app code; what is the line? As far as simple math and software patents; exactly. I would really love to see a court case happen over something as trivial as QC unit to pixel virtual patch, but Apple clearly holds that right, and has chosen to start putting this quite visibly on many (if not all) of the patches. That's why everyone has their eyes on certain cases that are ongoing over patenting patently obvious concepts. I posit that there is still room for proving creativity and true innovation in methods; it just that they are way more rare than we would all like to think. The wheel and the printing press are those kind of things, and the people that invented them are long gone. James Morris developed lazy evaluation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Morris ), but somehow someone else can file a patent contingent upon it years later (raises eyebrow)? I digress. What I balk at is that it seems like I have bought a system that has these Developer Tools on them, and that things get seriously hamstrung if it becomes more work to track what I can/cannot use than it actually takes to program the stuff in the first place! I also kind of expect frameworks, whether public or private to be able to be able to be used willy-nilly, since I'm sending them to people that have OS X anyway. Am I wrong, or hasn't it been suggested by Apple that it's ok to include private frameworks in-app if your application relies on them, as the frameworks might break on OS updates? I'm almost certain that I've read this suggested in old notes at the ADC (though finding old links is totally impossible now). It also seems like some of the virtual patches may have updates in between OS updates (though I'm not 100% sure), as there were prompts to "update" at certain points, when opening older qtz's. It would be great to just be able to use the version of a virtual patch "flattened" that we want to without worrying about it changing, after going through the hoops to load it in an app. The heavy reliance on virtual patches is inevitably going to make for many problems, as people modify or move patches without being aware of the ramifications. This is totally independent from legal issues. I believe that some of them (the virtual patches and system compositions) don't or didn't have copyright on them, but it doesn't really matter if they are tagged with a copyright, as copyright is implicit in this case given the user agreement (and that much is not opinion). Lack of clarity on this = major bummer (Patent Applied For). -George Toledo
_______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Quartzcomposer-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/quartzcomposer-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [email protected]
