[Mageia-dev] [RFC] move cairo-dock to tainted because of trademark/patent issues

Wed Nov 9 14:14:43 CET 2011

Hi there,
+
+after updating cairo-dock and -plugins to the latest version,
+it has come to my attention that cairo-dock has been removed
+from Fedora due to patent issues, as can be seen here:
+http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=cairo-dock.git;a=blob;f=dead.package;h=2f21e743a00cfe3accc33b8d5c974f2572bcdfc5;hb=9e2eb0b9936f326a454f6104a81c6061a5528625
+I've found no further explanation about this so far.
+
+The corresponding patent (from Apple) should be this one:
+http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,434,177.PN.&OS=PN/7,434,177&RS=PN/7,434,177
+IMHO this Apple patent should not have been issued because of prior art:
+http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Apple_Dock but currently it's effective and we need to 
+respect it.
+
+A related discussions about cairo-dock and trademarks of
+some of the included icons in cairo-dock-plugins can be seen here:
+http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/legal/2009-January/000505.html
+To be honest, i don't think this was appropriate as those icons
+clearly seem to come from the game pingus, which is FL/OSS.
+
+So i request cairo-dock and cairo-dock-plugins and cairo-dock-themes
+be moved to tainted. Any objections?
+
+
+