i have a legal question. Libreoffice has an optional ribbon interface, i.e., a tabbed toolbar. when Microsoft first introduced this type of GUI element i believe that they patented this tabbed toolbar along with other interface elements.
are there any legal issues in implementing such a toolbar using GTK or Qt?
Obvously there were “issues” - just search for “ms vs corel ribbon” or similiar, but this doesn’t say MS can actually win in court. (I doubt they can in europe, but never take guesses on the US).
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You can check, if this was a design patent as these should expire after 14 years of, utility patents last 20 years.
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Obviously MS didn’t prevent TDF from including ribbons, but from a legal point this will not protect you… (But I’m not a lawyer.)
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It should not matter wich toolkit you use - only if you find the developer of the toolkit have a licence wich protects your work too - nearly impossible for programming toolkits.
Note that they weren’t the first to introduce it, though (I realize that the phrase I quote may be read differently, not necessarily describing their priority, but just the time when they introduced it for the first time for their products).
As this question is actually not on LO/TDF but on general use/gtk/kde I doubt they can/will help…
@Wanderer this question starts with an assertion (“Libreoffice has an optional ribbon interface”), which needs to be confirmed first, before trying to explore implications.
Further, if the question is “I see this UI in LibreOffice; I want to know if they had any legal problems with that, so that I can learn prior to implementing something similar in my different project”, then asking TDF is even more reasonable.
I was confused by tag base which implies a problem with the database component Base. Your question is not at all related with any DB.
Consequently, please, retag it as common with new tag legal. But even tag common seems to me dubious. Perhaps meta though it is used up to now for questions about the site.
About the question:
What is the definition of “ribbon interface”? LO uses words of “tabbed interface”, which is exactly what the UI is: a tabbed widget with switched toolbars. Is such a combination of elementary widgets patentable? In Europe, if a device or design are state-of-the-art, they can’t be protected. The case of a design is somewhat different from a device because it can be associated with an “identity”, a distinctive mark and falls under the category of “artistic” creation (different rules, different duration, different usage).
Also there is a big difference between Europe and USA. Any disclosure, be it in a science journal or a PhD thesis, prohibits patenting in Europe because this disclosure augments general public knowledge and thus state-of-the-art. This is not the case in USA (probably needing to follow some subtle rules).