RISC OS had a recognizable task bar around 1987, so 2006-2007 is just long enough for any patent on that concept to definitely expire. This story doesn't make any sense. As for dialog boxes with buttons at the bottom and plenty of buttons inside apps, the Amiga had them in 1984.
Yes, the Icon Bar is prior art, but there are 2 problems with that.
1. It directly inspired the NeXTstep Dock.
This is unprovable after so long, but the strong suspicion is that the Dock inspired Windows 4 "Chicago" (later Windows 95) -- MS definitely knew of NeXT, but probably never heard of Acorn.
So it's 2nd hand inspiration.
2. The Dock isn't a taskbar either.
3. What the prior art may be doesn't matter unless Acorn asserted it, which AFAIK it didn't, as it no longer existed by the time of the legal threats. Nobody else did either.
4. The product development of Win95 is well documented and you can see WIP versions, get them from the Internet Archive and run them, or just peruse screenshot galleries.
The odd thing is that the early development versions look less like the Dock or Icon Bar than later ones. It's not a direct copy: it's convergent evolution. If they'd copied, they would have got there a lot sooner, and it would be more similar than it is.
> so 2006-2007 is just long enough for any patent on that concept to definitely expire.
RISC OS as Arthur: 1987
NeXTstep 0.8 demo: 1988
Windows "Chicago" test builds: 1993, 5Y later, well inside a 20Y patent lifespan
Win95 release: 8Y later
KDE first release: 1998
GNOME first release: 1999
The chronology doesn't add up, IMHO.
> This story doesn't make any sense. As for dialog boxes with buttons at the bottom and plenty of buttons inside apps, the Amiga had them in 1984.
You're missing a different point here.
Buttons at the bottom date back to at least the Lisa.
The point is that GNOME 3 visibly and demonstrably was trying to avoid potential litigation by moving them to the CSD bar at the top. Just as in 1983 or so GEM made its menu bar drop-down instead of pull-down (menus open on mouseover, not on click) and in 1985 or so AmigaOS made them appear and open only on a right-click -- in attempts to avoid getting sued by Apple.
> The point is that GNOME 3 visibly and demonstrably was trying to avoid potential litigation by moving them to the CSD bar at the top.
Well, the buttons in the titlebar at the top are reminiscent of old Windows CE dialog boxes, so I guess they're not really original either! What both Unity and GNOME 3 looks like to me is an honest attempt to immediately lead in "convergence" with mobile touch-based solutions. They first came up in the netbook era where making Linux run out-of-the-box on a market-leading small-screen, perhaps touch-based device was quite easy - a kind of ease we're only now getting back to, in fact.
