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Difference between revisions of "Apple Inc."

(Court cases and lawsuits: * Mirror Worlds v. Apple (2008, USA))
(Steve Jobs on "stealing")
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'''Apple inc.''' has [[software patents]] and has used them aggressively (such as [[Apple v. HTC (2010, USA)|against HTC Corporation]], in 2010).
 
'''Apple inc.''' has [[software patents]] and has used them aggressively (such as [[Apple v. HTC (2010, USA)|against HTC Corporation]], in 2010).
  
==Steve Jobs on "stealing"==
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==Steve Jobs on Picasso's notion of "stealing"==
  
 
The CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs has previously acknowledged that software developement requires building new ideas on existing ideas.  While explaining the value of this, he called it "stealing", but he was portraying it in a positive way.  It's usually called "incremental development".
 
The CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs has previously acknowledged that software developement requires building new ideas on existing ideas.  While explaining the value of this, he called it "stealing", but he was portraying it in a positive way.  It's usually called "incremental development".

Revision as of 23:00, 7 October 2010

Apple inc. has software patents and has used them aggressively (such as against HTC Corporation, in 2010).

Steve Jobs on Picasso's notion of "stealing"

The CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs has previously acknowledged that software developement requires building new ideas on existing ideas. While explaining the value of this, he called it "stealing", but he was portraying it in a positive way. It's usually called "incremental development".

It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean, Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And, we have, y'know, always been shameless about stealing great ideas[...][1] (Date unknown but by his age, it's clearly pre-2000)

Patenting LLVM?

Apple, while contributing to the free software LLVM project, has been granted multiple patents mentioning LLVM.

The LLVM software is distributed under a licence which gives no patent protection to recipients.

Can you help? LLVM's contributor policy[1] asks contributors to give free access to necessary patents. Has Apple done this? Do Apple's patents cover code they've contributed to LLVM or are they for non-contributed extensions?


Apple was granted a patent on 17 June 2010, for "Converting javascript into a device-independent representation" including:[2]

1. A method for processing computer code, comprising:storing a device-independent intermediate representation of a source code; andin the event an indication is received that the source code has changed, using the changed source code to generate and store a new intermediate representation of the changed source code.
[...]
8. A method as recited in claim 1, wherein the intermediate representation comprises LLVM intermediate representation (IR), LLVM byte code or other byte code, or another appropriate intermediate representation.

LLVM is also mentioned multiple times in the patent section titled "Detailed description".

Possible prior art includes [2], [3], [4], and the "UCSD p-System".

Another Apple patent mentioning LLVM is titled Virtual memory system that is portable between different CPU types.

Related pages on ESP Wiki

Court cases and lawsuits

External links

References