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

Wed Nov 9 21:15:54 CET 2011

Le mercredi 09 novembre 2011 à 14:14 +0100, Florian Hubold a écrit :
+> 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.
+
+The base claim is indeed weak. 
+
+> 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?
+
+Yes, I do have one, I think we agreed that tainted was for enforced
+patents, or those that would likely be enforced. While the definition is
+fuzzy, I doubt that the patent will be enforced, mainly because it is
+weak, 
+
+Red Hat lawyers are right for a US company, but we are not in the same
+position as Red Hat ( ie, we are not in the US, we are not a company
+with several millions on the bank account and no one will ever attack us
+because we are competing with them ).
+
+For the icons, what is the problem exactly, ie what icons are
+copyrighted ?
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+
+