LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Ben Williams <benw@webmedia.com.au>
  To  : <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 18:21:28 +0930

RE: Adobe attack on Open-source

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ilox [mailto:ilox@telstra.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, 18 July 2001 6:12 PM
> To: David Newall
> Cc: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
> Subject: Re: Adobe attack on Open-source
>
>
> Hi David,
>
> Ok, so apart from the name being similar what about the rest of the
> situation where the lawyer acting for Adobe writes to the Professor
> telling him to stop development on the Project and then asks for
> payment for their time to send him the letter?

it's not as simple as that. there was a story on slashdot about this
that i read actually
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/17/1355244&mode=thread -
imagine that, an informative slashdot article) in which it says that the
basic thing of it is, the lawyer wasn't working on the direct say-so of
adobe. it's a weird facet of german law (seemed weird to me at least)
whereby an authority (in this case, the lawyer) can 'warn' a company if
they believe an infringement of copyright has taken place, on behalf of
another company without that company's knowledge or consent, and then
(try to) charge one or both companies involved. check out
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/20431.html for more also.

<snip>
> Adobe, or at least the people who said they were acting for them,
> appear to have been heavy-handed in their approach to resolving the
> matter. Just because a name is similar is not enough grounds
> to jumping
> to court especially as the program is still in early development.

those links above said that adobe aren't all that happy with the lawyer
either!

> I am also not impressed with the claim from the attorneys for their
> fees to be paid by the Professor. Paying for the bills for lawyer's
> time should come from the party requesting them to act on
> their behalf
> in this kind of situation. Nothing has been proven. No judge
> has issued
> a decision. There is only a statement of claim from one party.

that's lawyers for you; take a nice idea in the law, turn it into a way
to make money and leech all you can from unsuspecting victims.

they've changed the name to Kontour now. on a (slightly) related note,
what do people think of the Kxxx naming of programs in KDE? (or the Gxxx
of Gnu/Gnome?)

 - Ben

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