Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal
jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com
jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com
Notice that even if he was at a keynote, selling to the world Mac OS 9 and new iMacs, he personally used a PC laptop running a version of NeXT/OpenStep and the software that was sold to Sun. They eventually hired the same developers to build Keynote.
I just found a quote from Steve that could be one of my favourites quotes ever: "I started to realize that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Kairolie Baba put together."
He may not have had time to implement his vision, and he was handed a brilliant but broken company to work with.
I've followed his blog closely for the last few years, and I would say he comes off as one of the most in-touch CEO's out there.
And just for that he has my respect.
Please keep in mind that this was the CEO under which a number of very questionable actions (anti-trust, SCO) were effected.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/01/29/davos.bill.gates.dona...
In the innovative products race Steve Jobs wins. In the does good things race Bill Gates wins. It's admirable.
If a mafioso gives his money to charity do you think that qualifies him for sainthood ?
Ask the stacker guys if they think Bill Gates is a nice person.
His company is a convicted monopolist by the US government,not by OSS fans.
More anecdotally, most people acknowledge that Windows is pretty shit these days.
"My response was simple. "Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?" Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. [...] Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration."
(emphasis mine)
And regardless of any merits Jonathan had while CEO at SUN (starting 2006), under his guidance we've got open-source Java and OpenSolaris, not to mention increased focus on other open-source products like OpenOffice. So for the rest of us developers, it was a bigger win than anything Apple did from 2006 until now.
Also, your comment got "fanboy" written all over it.
I don't think that's exactly true. I think suing people has largely no effect on relevance, but you tend to sue competitors whose relevance is on the upswing. Nobody is going to sue Myspace right now for IP infringement, for instance, they're going to sue Facebook.
So we have patent trolling targeting interesting companies on the rise, and the media selecting for stories about interesting companies on the rise. It could definitely be causality in the other direction.
Some history is illuminating. The first important lawsuit that Apple filed was against the Franklin Ace. This was in the early 80s. Heard about the Franklin Ace recently?
No matter how many times people tell Steve Jobs otherwise, he's been here before. And the very first time he did it, he won an important victory.
This may be why he can reconcile suing HTC while practicing the "great artists steal" mantra.
On the other hand, the legend that Steve lifted the Xerox PARC UI persists -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_i... and
You can take a look at a demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXv8VlpoK_g
There were a few posts that stuck with me. I remember this one in particular, from 2005, about reducing their customer survey to a single question: would you recommend Sun?
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/defining_quality
I'm glad he's back at it with this new blog.
for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
I wonder if he's proud of suing HTC over those silly software patents like "Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image"
I'm not sure what to be more appalled at, the fact that the patent office actually issued that, or that apple is seriously suing over it.
It seems to me that if such things can't be copyrighted, or trademarked, aren't covered by design patents, and shouldn't covered by utility patents, then choosing to implement something in software rather than hardware would be a losing proposition for anyone trying to differentiate or innovate.
Just because an interface object behaves in a way reminiscent of a physical object does not mean it is that object. It has an entirely different mechanism. What you're saying is that one kind of mechanism should be patentable while another should not, but it's not clear why there is a distinction.
Read the patent. It describes the specific way the iPhone's unlock screen works, which to my knowledge (and evidently that of the USPTO) was novel at the time it was patented. If you want to know what is supposedly innovative about it, that would be the logical place to look, wouldn't it?
With that in mind, I'll ask again: is theres something specific about that patent that is amiss, or is the whole idea that software-defined interface behaviors can be patented wrong to you?
Is it still (really?) "non-obvious" that GUI elements may mimic physical devices?
Irrelevant. There is no patent on "GUI Element That Mimics Physical Device". That's a concept, not a thing that can be patented. The idea of software interfaces that behave somewhat like physical objects may not be novel, but that tells you nothing about the novelty or lack thereof in any specific interface.
What is so innovative about a virtual toggle switch?
Depends on the switch. But again, this is not a patent on "the idea of virtual toggle switches", it is a patent on the specific way that Apple's unlock screen works. It should be obvious to anyone that there is more than one way to implement an unlock screen, few of which would infringe on Apple's patent, and many of which don't involve ersatz switches at all.
"The American dream is that if the average American invents something novel and worthy of patenting, he'll find someone to license it. However, for most contemporary inventors , it hasn't worked out that way. The independent inventor today still has an extremely difficult time convincing corporations that he has a product which deserves to be on the market. Most companies have a tremendous resistance to ideas and technology developed on the outside."
"You cannot develop a reputation for somebody who gives up. You have to be known as a fighter for your rights. Otherwise, you'll never license anything...Even Thomas Edison had a tough time supporting and protecting his patents. He spent about $1.4 million [to defend his inventions], and this was around the turn of the century, when beer was a nickel."
> Lo and behold, the local jury decided Sun should pay Kodak more than a hundred million dollars.
> Groups with no business focus other than litigating patent suits are affectionately known as trolls – pure litigation entities.
Patent #5,206,951:
Integration of data between typed objects by mutual, direct invocation between object managers corresponding to object types
http://www.google.com/patents?id=3KUXAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...
Patent #5,421,012:
Multitasking computer system for integrating the operation of different application programs which manipulate data objects of different types
http://www.google.com/patents?id=M44eAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...
Patent #5,226,161:
Integration of data between typed data structures by mutual direct invocation between data managers corresponding to data types
http://www.google.com/patents?id=wbkXAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...
Patent list: http://java.sys-con.com/node/46599
Obviously Apple, MS, Google, and others need to do a better job of it.
MSR regularly does amazing stuff, of which a lot gets patented: http://www.google.com/search?q=MS+Research+patents
I'd say hiring lots of bright guys and girls and investing heavily in R&D ($9.5B according to 1) constitutes positive economic activity.
[1] http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=3214217&...
If you're lucky you might get a settlement out of it. Otherwise you've slowed them down a little while they were distracted fighting your lawsuit.
So yeah, he's the big stud who "faced down Steve Jobs and Bill Gates". If you want to critique something, disagree with what he's saying, since ad hominems add nothing of value and are insipid / rude / a waist of time for everybody reading.