Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. Patents last 20 years. Gnome 3 development didn't really start in earnest until 2008 (2 years after the alleged reason for the change), a 2 year timeline before any patent MS could claim on position of the x button or start start button. Gnome 3 was finished in 2011, 1 year after any patent related to windows 3 or earlier would be dead and buried.
And arguably, some of the design elements of mention in this post were present in windows 1.0, released in 1986.
There are also other prior art examples such as Amiga released in 1985 which had similar "top right button closes the application" design elements.
And then let's not forget, this is about enforcing patents. Not something that's really easy to do with FOSS, hence the reason projects like FFMPEG and x264 have stuck around even though they very clearly violate a bunch of patents (if someone distributes the binary). Heck, even projects like DeCSS2 were almost impossible to kill off with it's explicit flaunting of the DMCA.
Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. Patents last 20 years. Gnome 3 development didn't really start in earnest until 2008 (2 years after the alleged reason for the change), a 2 year timeline before any patent MS could claim on position of the x button or start start button. Gnome 3 was finished in 2011, 1 year after any patent related to windows 3 or earlier would be dead and buried.
And arguably, some of the design elements of mention in this post were present in windows 1.0, released in 1986.
There are also other prior art examples such as Amiga released in 1985 which had similar "top right button closes the application" design elements.
And then let's not forget, this is about enforcing patents. Not something that's really easy to do with FOSS, hence the reason projects like FFMPEG and x264 have stuck around even though they very clearly violate a bunch of patents (if someone distributes the binary). Heck, even projects like DeCSS2 were almost impossible to kill off with it's explicit flaunting of the DMCA.