landauer@morocco.Sun.COM (Doug Landauer) (03/12/88)
In article <484@siemens.UUCP>, wagner@gypsy.UUCP (Mike Wagner) wrote: > An interesting anecdote. When I was working at Xerox, some people from DRI > came up from Monterey to talk to my manager about their troubles with Apple. > Seems they wanted to see a Star environment ... > Maybe their "copyright > infringements" were much more than just pull-down menus (MacPaint, ...). > Or maybe they couldn't afford the fight. At Xerox we were all pulling for DRI. > Wish they'd stuck it out. DRI simply couldn't afford to fight it, *and* they were on shaky legal grounds as far as the *applications* (GEMwrite, GEMdraw & GEMpaint) went. Even if DRI's lawyers had decided that Apple had no case, it was a good marketing decision to say "Yessir, Apple, we'll make some changes", because even without much of a case, Apple could have tied up DRI for months or years in court while customers would avoid GEM because of uncertainty about whether GEM would continue to exist. Actually, in hindsight (though I didn't think so at the time), I think Apple showed remarkable restraint in allowing DRI to sell GEM with only a few minor interface changes. They clearly could have crushed GEM like a worm if they'd really wanted to. The sad part (to me) was that the lemming customers believed Microsoft's Windows schedules, so that they had to wait until *years* later, for an enormous, slow product that would have IBM's blessing. In a different article, Pierce T. Wetter wrote: > In other words, they'd never seen anything _but_ the mac environment so they > must of copied the mac interface exactly. If they'd never seen a star they > couldn't have copied it. QED. Pierce is making a common mistake here -- DRI is a company, not a single person. The primary author of GEM, Lee Lorenzen, worked at Xerox before coming to DRI. Yes, he'd seen Xerox Stars, as had many of the engineers who worked on GEM at DRI. I suspect that the people who Mike Wagner saw were lawyers, not engineers. [Lee later left DRI to become a co-founder of Ventura Software. Xerox later bought Ventura Software. It's a small industry ... ] Disclaimer -- my current employer has no bearing on these opinions. My previous employer (DRI) did, but they no longer care what I think. -- Doug Landauer Sun Microsystems, Inc. ARPA Internet: landauer@sun.com Software Products Division UUCP: ...!sun!landauer