Borland case, in which case it was ruled that a menu system was not artistic expression protected by copyright. Unfortunately for Apple, the original licensing agreement for Windows 1.0 was extremely liberal, and Microsoft prevailed.Ī better precedent for your argument is the canonical Lotus vs. Microsoft claimed that since 2.0 shared the same name as 1.0, it was clearly just a continuation of Windows. Apple contended that Windows 2.0 was such a different beast from Windows 1.0 that the original license didn't apply. The question instead was whether Microsoft's license of Apple's 'look and feel' for Windows 1.0 carried over into Windows 2.0. The legal question in that case was not whether a 'look and feel' could be protected as intellectual property that was actually assumed to be true. Microsoft case is actually poor evidence in this situation. What the Parc guys didn't realise is that Steve 'got it' not because he was a visionary genius but because Jef Raskin (and others at Apple) had been patiently explaining the same concepts to him for years (going back to Jef Raskin visiting the Steve's back in their famous garage). The guys at Parc saw it that way because Steve really did 'get it'. Steve, because it reinforces his reputations as a visionary genius (HE understood the significance of the GUI when the suits at Xerox were blind, He saw 'it was good' and he bid it be fruitful and multiply). Quoting from memorty (I can't find his orginal essay on the history of the mac) he attributes the persistance of the myth to the fact that both Steve Jobs and the former Parc guys retell it that way.

The honest intellectual debt the Mac owes to the work at PARC was not a case of highway robbery. Many didn't speak with me: without knowing that I had worked out many of the key usability ideas when Jobs was still in grade school and before there was a Xerox PARC to learn from, it is perhaps understandable that people would find it necessary to invent a history that derives the Mac's genesis from the nearest similar work. Most of the histories of the Mac were written without their authors interviewing the original team (Brian Howard, who contributed so much, is always missed), and the history of the Mac that Apple's own P/R department dispensed was based on Jobs's version.

For one thing the usual account (as in Levy's book, 'Insanely Great' and others) denigrates the original and creative work done by all the Apple employees that put their hearts into the Mac. It was not, as many accounts anachronistically relate, stolen from PARC by Steve Jobs after he saw the Alto running SmallTalk on a visit. He Mac was by no means the work of one person, but the combined efforts of thousands in hundreds of companies large and small.

Openoffice mac os 10.3