Grass-Roots Movement Protests Software Suits

Grass-Roots Movement Protests Software Suits

June Gross
Computer Reseller News

April 24, 1989

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Efforts by industry heavyweights to stake legal claims to user interfaces have stirred an angry backlash by developers and computer scientists and invoked calls for changes in the laws dealing with intellectual property rights.

At The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, computer scientists have started a grass-roots campaign to turn young developers against Apple Computer Inc. and Lotus Development Corp., two companies now embroiled in lawsuits to protect user interfaces.

An advertisement 10 days ago in the MIT student newspaper, The Tech, warned readers to "keep their lawyers off our computers," and claimed that the success of these suits in the courts would hobble the software industry.

Last month Apple obtained a summary judgment, a first-round win against Microsoft Corp., in its suit claiming ownership of aspects of the user interface used in Microsoft Windows version 2.03. Apple is also suing Hewlett-Packard Co. over its NewWave interface.

Andy Hertzfeld, a key member of the original Macintosh development team and now an independent developer, is considering filing a friend-of-the-court brief arguing against the position taken by Apple.

"I created a lot of the ideas being contested now," Hertzfeld said. "I couldn't create those ideas given the ground rules being established now."

Mitch Kapor-former chairman of Lotus Development Corp. and currently president of On Technology, a developer of Macintosh system software and user interfaces-has called for the creation of a bipartisan government commission to clarify the laws now being applied to software development.

"Unless we develop a social consensus about what is going to be covered by intellectual property rights laws, everyone is going to be the loser," said Kapor. "We need to rethink the balance between intellectual property rights and what doesn't stifle innovation," he said.

The MIT advertisement was signed by MIT professor and computer guru Marvin Minsky; Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation and developer of the UNIX operating system clone called Gnu; and MIT computer-science professor Gerald Sussman.

The advertisement states: "Until two years ago, the law seemed clear; no one could restrict others from using a user interface, [and! programmers were free to implement any interface they chose.

"Imitating interfaces, sometimes with changes, was standard practice in the computer field. The interfaces we know evolved gradually in this way. For example, the Macintosh user interface was developed over [a period of! 15 years at Stanford, . . . Xerox and other places. Hundreds of students and researchers contributed to this effort, and no one has a right to own it all now," read the statement.

The effects on users and the industry, the statement goes on to say, is that software will become and remain expensive, and users will be "locked in" to proprietary interfaces and be burdened by gratuitous incompatibilities between products.

Sussman has already seen instances of companies' and individuals' halting development because of fears of legal reprisals if intellectual property can be proved.

"I don't like any change where things that used to be free become property," Sussman said.

Another user-interface spat came to light last month when Metaphor Computer Systems Inc. filed suit against Xerox Corp. Metaphor asked the court to remove Xerox's threat of legal action over claims of copyright infringement by Metaphor's user interface.

Objections to patenting interfaces are based on both practical and business considerations. If patents are secured for the "building blocks" of products, the cost and development time of products would grow, to the detriment of all, said Ross Wolfley, WordPerfect Corp.'s director of personal-computer marketing. He is also a lawyer.

On the competitive side, "companies are rushing off to the patent office to try to garner a corner of the market through the use of patents," Wolfley said.

Tom Lemberg, Lotus' vice president and general counsel, said that in the case of Lotus' suits against Mosaic Software Inc. and Paperback Software International, the issues are not about creativity or initiative.

"[The companies! copied on a keystoke-by-keystroke basis the words and commands and macros in our program," Lemberg said. "The fact is that they copied our interface essentially and totally. This is not a case of a `little bit of this and a little bit of that.'

As Apple has been accused of using the courts to forestall the distribution of a Macintosh-competitive interface on DOS or OS/2 platforms, large companies attempting to deter competition from small companies can also take the court route.

"You want to write the greatest programs possible. When you see a great idea, you'd like to be able to use it. I love it when other programmers copy my stuff," said Hertzfeld.

However, copying details and exact things such as code or bit maps is where Hertzfeld draws the line.

The MIT advertisement was sparked by an electronic-mail exchange initiated by an Apple developer who complained to others on a UNIX network that Stallman's Gnu C compiler was not incorporating the developments that Apple has made in its version of UNIX.

Stallman noted that he has refused to make the changes on principle because of the Apple lawsuit. In another instance, Stallman has refused to cooperate with a Lotus developer using his compiler.