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