Leica This had better not be true...

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If true, such chutzpah is a major miscalculation.

If there come about petitions to Leica to treat AppCam fairly, I'll happily sign. To let something so obvious and visible be appropriated without cutting the original developers in? Perhaps not a legal miscalculation, but certainly one in the realm of public opinion.

For anyone from Leica, if you happen to be reading: I'll reserve final judgement, but this looks pretty bad. Should I, someone who buys and uses your products, pay your premium prices so that you can cut out the idea people? Extraordinarily short-sighted of you, among probably worse indiscretions. I hope you realize that legal immoralities are still immoralities ...

Seemingly appropriate to the situation: "unfortunate, amiss, bum, crappy, dissatisfactory, poor, rotten, evil, immoral, iniquitous, reprobate, sinful, vicious, wicked, wrong, deficient, inadequate, inferior; careless, slipshod, defective, disordered, off, unsound; execrable, lousy, miserable, piss-poor, wretched; inadmissible, objectionable, unacceptable; insufferable, intolerable." (From a web answer to "synonyms for a 'bad thing.'")

If true, perhaps the most damning for Leica: "inferior."

Yes, we do have to give Leica a chance to tell their side of the story.
 
Do they claim that their code was ripped off and used as the basis for the embedded OS in the camera? Or that it's a "Look and Feel?" thing.

A big difference.

CP/m looked a lot like RT-11; MS-DOS looked like CP/m, Apple Lisa looked like Xerox Parc, Windows looked like Xerox Parc.
 
It may not be the code, but if they led them on and then ran with the concept, it's not right.

Lots of cameras looked like they're from the 60's or 70's. This is taking a newly developed way of doing things, and running with it. Imagine a car company collaborating with a design firm on a new concept car, kick them out, then put out a model with essentially the same design?

Xerox PARC had perhaps the first GUI front-end, but didn't know enough to do anything with it, so frustrated engineers gave Apple personnel a demo so the idea would at least get used. AppCam *wants* to commercialize this, a different situation.

And look at Apple now, they'll sue the pants off anyone who makes something that looks anything close to the iPhone "way."

Perhaps AppCam needed more patents and trade protections similar to Apple to protect themselves. Doesn't make it acceptable in my book for Leica to essentially take their ideas and just cut them out. Legally, sure looks like no worries. Morally right? Not the way I see things.

My opinion. If I hear mitigating circumstances, I might change my mind.
 
Well, it is possible Leica had something similar already in the works when they were approached with this concept. Of course, it's also possible this was a complete ripoff. I'd love to see the internal memos of both companies . . . with original dates intact.
 
Well they are going to get sued by Leica as sure as night follows day for making this claim they way they have, and sorry but it sounds and feels like an extremely amateur operation for them to go about things in this way. If they had a detailed NDA signed up with Leica before they had discussions with them then they should have gone the legal route. An old friend of mine and former colleague managed to get a no win no fee lawyer to take him on after a nearly identical issue with a major automotive parts supplier. They said exactly the same sort of thing to him then 5 years later showed a blatant copy of his invention at a trade show. Difference was he had detailed NDA and records from the earlier meetings saying exactly what was being discussed and consequently patent applications in the system before they made their mistake of trying to rip him off. Still though last I talked to him it was dragging on and on but he did get a cease and desist on the company which proved effective but a financial windfall seemed elusive.
 
It would be the bitterly disappointed final straw for me with Leica.

Bill I have pretty much decided that Leica = film M and a handful of lenses for me. If I buy another digital camera in the future it most certainly will not be a Leica, regardless of this latest 'incident' they are fast becoming just like Rolex a luxury goods company trading on past glories but with practically zero relevance any more within the field they once led. I am a photographer not a collector of luxury goods.
 
Xerox Parc was an R&D Lab, gave tours. Unless you worked there at the time, and knew the engineers- I doubt they were frustrated about their invention.

'except they tap the screen instead of use a dial'- yeah, okay- my wife taps the back of her Samsung phone to take a picture and change settings. I tap the back of the Video camera for a lot of settings.

If Leica ripped off code and used it, that's stealing. Otherwise, quit whining.
 
So, the rest of us who own Leica digital are "collectors of luxury goods" and not photographers then? Nice...

I own an M8 but its pretty clear where the company is going with the Boutiques, the T system, the waiting lists and drip drip supply. Its straight out of the swiss watch industry text book. Its funny actually over on another forum there was a big hoohah about my local dealer going out of business because they where selling off their last Leica stocks. I went there the other week, the truth is they moved into newer plusher premises round the corner (about 4x nicer in fact) but have dropped Leica because in their own words they were sick of all the nonsense and just don't want to deal with their products any more.
 
I own an M8 but its pretty clear where the company is going with the Boutiques, the T system, the waiting lists and drip drip supply. Its straight out of the swiss watch industry text book. Its funny actually over on another forum there was a big hoohah about my local dealer going out of business because they where selling off their last Leica stocks. I went there the other week, the truth is they moved into newer plusher premises round the corner (about 4x nicer in fact) but have dropped Leica because in their own words they were sick of all the nonsense and just don't want to deal with their products any more.

It's one thing to dislike Leica's way of marketing their products, and another to imply that users of Leica digital are not photographers. I think many of the participants in this forum provide ample evidence to the contrary.
 
Leica is profitable, and set up a new factory to keep up with demand. You do not have to go far to find a lot of excellent photographs taken with Leica digital cameras.

I've worked as a computer engineer at a Research lab for over 35 years. The only reason an engineer working at a research lab should have for being frustrated is being "promoted" into management. Although I do know that the Kodak engineers had wanted to do a Monochrome camera ever since the M8 came out. So they had to wait a little longer. I called them up 4.5years ago about a monochrome version of an M9.

As far as this particular incident- digital cameras have a lot of functions that need to be set. Touch screens have been around for a long time. The implementation of the user interface of the Leica T is pretty much obvious.

It's a good thing that Univac's patent regarding computers did not get enforced. Otherwise, we'd all be using Univacs.
 
I saw the video of AppCam's product / design when this story hit PetaPixel, and it doesn't look all that similar to the Leica T in my opinion, other than the basic concept of a large touch screen interface (which is hardly unique to AppCam).

Unless they're alleging code was stolen, or I see a much more convincing comparison showing major similarities beyond what would be obvious or plausible to anybody designing a touch screen camera interface in 2014, I'm not going to jump to any conclusions.
 
So this is a company that wrote software in search of hardware. from their website, the interface does not look that much different from my Olympus EP2- bought over 4 years ago. Digital cameras have a lot of common functions, and there are only so many ways of setting them. The embedded code to implement those functions- that's the hard part. Producing layered software that communicates with the underlying hardware, can adapt itself to the hardware registers and memory maps- that's the trick to a fast port. That is the long-cycle in product development, and having software ready to run when the hardware platform is in development means a shorter time to market.

This company is doing itself a disservice by whining about the user interface of the Leica T looks like their's- except Leica users tap the screen instead of using dials and buttons. If Leica had ripped off their code, they would have a case. They don't. I'm sure they looked. I worked with an engineer that found his code in another company's product. Me, I give my source code out as part of the product distribution.

Written about 25 years ago, my software design philosophy.

http://www.nirvani.net/docs/program_like_a_klingon.txt
 
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