F10 Things Breaking

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Sunday 22 March 2009 04:14, Mamoru Tasaka wrote:
>
> Red Hat Legal felt that these two packages (kooldock and cairo-dock) have
> the possibility of infringing Apple's software patent and removed these
> two packages from rawhide tree. That is, these two pacakges will no longer
> be available on Fedora 11.

Well I guess that the maintainers of these packages will simply move them to 
rpmfusion, right? And that should make it a non-issue, afaiu?

Or shall we have to compile those packages from source ourselves?

What I don't understand is how can a thing like this happen? Fedora's policy 
is to include only "FOSS", "non-encumbered" etc. stuff? And I understood that 
GPL makes this irreversible --- once GPL'ed, always GPL'ed? So how can Apple 
force Fedora (or Red Hat) to remove some of its previously existing parts? I 
mean, if Apple somehow manages to patent the kernel, Red Hat would be forced 
to remove it? This sounds ridiculous, but this just did happen with 
cairo-dock, right?

What exactly did Apple patent here? The idea of having a panel on the screen? 
The artwork? The idea of a panel having nice animations? Isn't there an issue 
of that "prior art" thing? Apple did not invent panels in general, or did 
they? What would happen if KDE developers would decide to make the KDE panel 
look like the cairo-dock? Would that infringe Apple's patent? Who decides 
what "look like" means in this case?

Btw, Apple was the first to design and implement "the cube" effect of 
switching desktops. If they decide to patent that as well, KDE and Compiz and 
others would have to remove appropriate code and be required to not have such 
capabilities?

I am a bit of a noob for this legal stuff, would appreciate if someone 
explained it to me. :-)

Best, :-)
Marko