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

[Michael Scherer]

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