I didn’t realize this but…
David’s quote gets to the crux of things. For it to be considered a “copy” they had to stay within strict guidelines. The farther away you deviate, or the more generic you are, the harder it is to argue it’s a copy falling within license terms. The ribbon is a good illustration of the grayness of perception of the law on inspiration/infringement. Consider how different and similar it is to many other navigation schemes. Nearly every creative application in the world makes use of docked windows, icon palettes, toolbars, status bars, menu navigation and many other common design patterns. While Microsoft pushed to license their design (which makes sense I guess since they are in the business of licensing), it is hard to tell what would actually hold up in court. It’s possible Avid licensed because licensing was advertised and they wanted to avoid conflict, but the (il)legality behind copying that design is not as stringent as you think.
For example, at some point in the last few decades (well within copyright restrictions) a designer came up with the idea to turn labels into tooltips behind icons and the icon palette was born. Do you think Dorico is licensing this pattern? Do you think they would be had the designer worked for a company in the licensing business? What about the dialog pattern? Or the “wizard” style navigation pattern used inside Dorico dialogs? Or the search pattern that filters settings as you type? There are tons of other patterns that our favorite notation program implements which fall into the same bucket as the “ribbon” pattern except these patterns were not developed by an organization like Microsoft.
My point here is that a concern for copying or looking similar to something else is not as strict as you’d think. It is quite difficult for a judge to legally distinguish a ribbon from tabbed navigation or from tabbed palettes (seen in tons of creative apps) so to make a case of infringement you have to design strictly to what Microsoft licensed. And even then, it’s possible Microsoft wouldn’t win the case.
The MuseScore design is clearly not a replica of Dorico, while clearly inspired by it. This is totally legal, but if the Dorico team sees a loss of revenue directly attributed to MuseScore’s design similarities (very unlikely) they might try to build a case. Again, there is no guaranteed win here, this is not like plagiarism where exact replicas are attributed to different authors. Dorico, like MuseScore, like all software, comes from a long line of borrowing elements from previous creations. This should be embraced except in conditions of true unfairness and loss.