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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

I really don't think that posts that consist of nothing but a single link, like this one, should be acceptable. You link to a web page and don't make any argument. This is disingenuous.

It lets you pretend like you've taken a position or refuted the person you're responding to, but since you haven't actually said anything you can't be debated with. You can't be pinned down on saying any position, which means you can't be refuted.

Now, if you made an argument, and then linked to a wikipedia page to support that argument, besides the fact that wikipedia is not authoritative and is edited by amateurs, often with an agenda, that would be much better. At least then you're introducing potential facts to support an argument.

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I think pointing out the Xerox Star is sufficient to make my point.

I agree that it's important that you can pin my argument down though so hopefully this will make it clear: HP's copying of the iMac is not much different from Apple's copying of the Xerox Star. The two main differences are that a) Apple copied a huge amount from Xerox and HP seem to just have copied the UI rather superficially and the end result seems mediocre and b) America has software patents now.

Apple licensed the technology that it "copied" from Xerox. Are you suggesting that HP has licensed the loc of the iMac from Apple?

I don't know whether HP licensed anything. I doubt it, I suppose.

It seems Apple didn't license anything from Xerox either. Considering you think otherwise, I'd be interested in a citation. It's well documented that Xerox tried to sue (but they failed).

Xerox and Apple had a deal, so all you are implying is wrong. I found this article, it's German, but a couple YT videos are embedded about that time. I read about it in the Steve Jobs bio too.

http://www.mac-history.de/die-geschichte-des-apple-macintosh...

I googled the Xerox v Apple case, and in the first paragraph of section I ("ALLEGATIONS OF XEROX' COMPLAINT"), it says:

> On June 9, 1981, Xerox granted Apple a license pursuant to which Apple agreed to "participate in a project with the Learning Research Group at PARC/Xerox for the purpose of implementing the Smalltalk-80 language and system on a hardware system to be developed by [Apple]."

So clearly even Xerox admitted they licensed some of their work to Apple.

[1]: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3538913398421433...

Hold on - that doesn't seem to say what people want to think it's saying, does it? That's a license to use Smalltalk-80 in products. It isn't a license to use the Xerox Parc system or look and feel at all. I think the point remains: if there had been software patents at the time of the original litigation, Xerox would have won. Am I missing something?

Here is a referenced blog post, that also discusses the lawsuit:

http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-st...

I wonder if all those beige PC clone makers did licence anything from anyone design wise. In other words, what if Apple design is to become the ned beige PC style? Cheap PC keyboards all look the same, and nobody complains. Same for screens, etc. What makes Apple design so distinctive is partly because it's neat, and partly because they're the sole computer makers to use it.

read "new" beige PC, not ned (or nerd, or nod).

I hate this. You're attempting to re-litigate something in public court that was already handled in actual, real-people court almost 20 years ago. Read the Legacy[0] section of your link.

Apple also licensed the tech behind Xerox Star. At least Xerox was compensated for their work in some manner.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star#Legacy

Sorry you hate it. I'm not sure how I'm attempting to re-litigate...that is something to do with litigation, and I'm not a lawyer.

That article absolutely does not say that Apple licensed anything from Xerox. It only says that Xerox later tried to sue over it but it was thrown out due to age.

From the page linked in footnote 10 I found the following tidbit:

> Tesler: No, we didn’t have one here. We went to the NCC when the Star was announced and looked at it. And in fact it did have an immediate impact. A few months after looking at it we made some changes to our user interface based on ideas that we got from it. For example, the desktop manager we had before was completely different; it didn’t use icons at all, and we never liked it very much. We decided to change ours to the icon base. That was probably the only thing we got from the Star, I think. Most of our Xerox inspiration was Smalltalk rather than Star.

Just thought this was interesting. And it's probably the modern equivalent of being inspired to move to touchscreen-based devices instead of keypad devices. Which, I might add, is pretty different than being "inspired" to completely clone a competing touchscreen-based device instead of coming up with your own UI and behaviors around the touchscreen metaphor.

That strikes me as an oversimplification. According to the NYT article [1], Xerox filed an "unfair competition" lawsuit, which was correctly dismissed (as Apple never tried to mislead consumers about whether they were buying an Apple computer or a Xerox computer, among other things).

The only reference to age I found is, according to a lawyer quoted in that article, "Xerox had waited too long to file a copyright infringement case and had to resort to a weaker charge of unfair competition". It looks like the statue of limitations on copyright infringement was (at the time) 3 years [2].

It's not clear to me if this is true or not. According to the case itself, "Xerox argues that an infringement action would not afford the relief it desires". (Is that lawyer-speak for "oops we forgot to file the right charges in time"?) Either way, I can find no record of a copyright infringement case brought by Xerox against Apple.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/24/business/most-of-xerox-s-s... [2]: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#507

So, you're saying that you hate it when people express dissenting opinions after cases have been decided? Should civil rights activists not have brought up their opinions after Plessy v. Ferguson?

In the long run, the court of public opinion is the driver of change. What makes the status quo so great that you hate it when people dissent? I don't agree with the person you're disagreeing with, but where would we be if we couldn't even discuss it?

Frm what i have read about the Star, nobody would confuse it with a Mac or vice versa. http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... indicates that at least some of the people who built the Macintosh Think similarly.

Probably no one would confuse it, but I don't think many would confuse this HP with a Mac either. The HP is, like the Star, running a different OS.

Is it? I boot my Mac into Windows fairly often. And that's irrelevant anyway, because HP is not selling an OS, they are selling hardware that happens to look extremely similar to an iMac.

In fact, on that first photo on the linked article I genuinely thought they had placed an Apple wireless keyboard and magic trackpad in front of the HP computer. And the only reason I knew that wasn't an iMac was because of the lack of the apple-logo-on-aluminum bar at the bottom, which was simply replaced by an HP logo in the exact same spot.

> I really don't think that posts that consist of nothing but a single link, like this one, should be acceptable. You link to a web page and don't make any argument. This is disingenuous.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

But seriously, a post which is a single link seems fine to me, so long as the information is related to the discussion at hand. For all one knows, the commenter was in line and commenting from her cell phone, and had to talk to a salesperson the next second.

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