tedkord

Rayz2016 said:

e39dinan said:

Neither of those articles provide any proof. It's all anecdotal, much like the original quote. 

What's anecdotal about it? The evidence is from the Xerox folk who were actually there, and certainly explains why Xerox didn't sue.

Xerox DID sue. You clearly don't know the history. And when they sued, Apple did NOT produce a sale or license agreement which would have ended the trial then and there. They rather argued that the elements weren't protectable. 

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xerox-sues-apple-computer-over-macintosh-copyright.html

emig647 said:

Yes according to the law.. VirnetX has a patent(s), and it was willfully (according to the courts) infringed on by Apple.

But the real story here is how horribly broken software patents are in general. Software patents put a large dampener on technological progression / innovation. The system needs a rework, and a rework quite soon.

These patents are 12-14 years old..

https://www.google.com/patents/US7921211
https://www.google.com/patents/US7490151
https://www.google.com/patents/US7418504
https://www.google.com/patents/US6502135

Software patents need to die. The coding needs to be protected by copyright, that's it.

Rayz2016 said:

e39dinan said:

Really?

http://i.imgur.com/lBNaIxg.png 

Yes, really.

http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-stole-gui-from-xerox-parc-alto/
http://zurb.com/article/801/steve-jobs-and-xerox-the-truth-about-inno

No matter what he was bragging about in the car, the Xerox stuff wasn't stolen; it was paid for with one million dollars of pre-IPO Apple stock. I wonder how much that stock would be worth today? 

No, it was not paid for. If it were, when Xerox later sued for the theft, Apple could simply have produced proof of the license or sale and the case would have gone POOF. Instead, they argued that it wasn't protectable. And since we had sane patent laws at the time pertaining to software, Apple won. Kind of ironic when you look at Apple today.

Apple paid for a tour. By that logic, I can now remake the latest Star Wars movie because I paid to see it. No one who claims it was paid for has ever been able to produce any evidence of a sale or licensing agreement. That's because there was none. Xerox would not have sued if they'd sold or licensed the GUI to Apple. Apple stole the idea.