People often misattribute this patent attack as on Android. What they don't realise is that most of patents involved are simply Linux or general computing patents. In other words, whether you love or hate Android or Google, is irrelevant. This is an exact example of a generic attack on a computing system through use of sketchy, over broad, under substantiated patents. MS happened to deploy it against Android because Android was the competitor of the day, but they can and will deploy it as suits their business interests against any technology or company out there.
> So, why are people still paying up rather than fighting? Because patent litigation is incredibly expensive. It's cheaper to pay a $5 to $15 per device licensing fee than to pay a small fortune and take even a remote chance of failure in court.
> Samsung alone paid Microsoft a billion bucks to license its Android patents.
Samsung simply stopped paying Microsoft the royalties after the Nokia purchase (Samsung claimed it was a breach of the agreement). Microsoft filed a suite, but after negotiations, the issue was settled[1] under confidential terms. Since then, Samsung now bundles Microsoft's software on its Android devices - feel free to speculate on the direction the payments might be going.
I have no inside information but I can imagine a conglomerate like Samsung which has a lot of business to do with Microsoft (including notebook computers and so on) would only pay Microsoft if they received some sort of assurance that they would not be unfairly targeted. Samsung sells everything from notebook computers to solid state drives and everything in between.
To repeat Don Draper in the Mad Men pilot (s01e01)
> The Federal Trade Commission and "Reader's Digest" have done you a favor. They've let you know that any ad that brings up the concept of health and cigarettes together, well, it just makes people think of cancer.
My thinking here is if I were in charge of all of Samsung, I wouldn't mind a $15 per device cost of doing business as long as I was reasonably sure that my competitors had to pay the same sum as well. If I were in charge of Samsung, my concern would be that Microsoft would play favorites with competitors like htc.
Please keep in mind that there are no facts here. just my guesses.
Maybe Samsung gets something out of it? Cross-patent licensing deal?
It's also worth noting that MicroSoft started looking for license payments while Samsung was still in court with Apple of patent issues. It's very possible they didn't want another large lawsuit.
I think Microsoft in a number of cases has made the cross licensing so lucrative that companies end up ahead by licensing the patents. They would do this, of course, to establish the precedent that they can then use to go on an leverage against smaller players. It would not surprise me at all if Samsung was in this situtation.
This "cost of litigation" argument is probably bogus. Even some of the epic patent battles like Apple v. Samsung or other decade long arbitrations like Yukos vs. Russia were like 50-60 Million USD in legal fees.
The bigger problem (for a large company) is the uncertainty caused by litigation. It's a distraction to the core business and can tie-up attempts to improve or expand on features accused in the litigation, not to mention it can spook investors.
I don't know about the OP, but if you pay me up front my shell company will agree to indemnify you against anything you want. For various reasons, I will not personally be responsible for any of it and I do draw a heft salary because I'm awesome. But if there is any money left over after design meetings in the Bahamas on the corporate yacht, I'm sure there will be lawyers available to take it.
I can't seem to understand if MSFT patents actually apply to the Android OS / AOSP or just to various firmware, middleware and software that OEM's use on their devices regardless of the OS in question.
The AOSP license and 3rd party notifications do not mention Microsoft and the patents listed in Chinese doc are like vague in the usual patent-esque way.
But in any case i don't really see the issue here, if MSFT gets royalties from these patents it would be irresponsible (to their shareholders, and employees) for them to ditch them, none of these patents claims actually seem to be aimed at Google or the AOSP project so it looks like the core Android OS is not really affected by this.
Google owns countless patents and Apple just might be the biggest patent troll in history and none of them seem to receive even remotely the same amount of scrutiny.
Sadly that means that there is likely one group of people in MS saying, "enforcing these patents gives us a large revenue stream that we don't have to do anything to maintain" (except for paying lawyers, but lawyers probably form part of the core of this group).
On the other side, there is likely another group of people in MS saying "hey guys, if we give up this massive guaranteed cash flow we could receive an impossible-to-predict-or-measure amount of goodwill from ill-defined groups of hypothetical people who might all just hate us anyway no matter what we do, and even if it does make them like us more we're not sure if it will really make a difference in the long run."
Now, I would be squarely in the latter group, because I think it's the right thing to do and is consistent with the kind of company that MS appears to be trying to transform itself into, but I've gotta think that that's a very tough case to argue to anyone who is actually in a position to make that call and is therefore held responsible for the outcome. I would try to make a much more convincing argument than the strawman I presented, but since it's all about intangibles, someone with an opposing viewpoint could probably make just as convincing of a case by framing my intangibles as that strawman, and there's not a whole lot anyone could say to refute it.
It's a local maximum seen throughout the industry- I think there is a growing realization outside of the usual niches (open source advocates, HN readers, etc.) that software patents are doing more harm than good, but in the individual isolated cases it still comes down to people arguing internally that an organization should give up a guaranteed revenue stream in exchange for theoretical goodwill that may or may not actually benefit the company in any tangible way. Lots of people hate stupid patents but patent holders would rather change the system for everyone, than go out on a limb and make a sacrifice like that with no guarantee that their competitors would follow suit. I don't envy anyone trying to fight the good fight in that environment.
The group of people that still hates Microsoft by and large will always hate them until they die. Even if they opened up the patents they'd still be hated for "being evil". There's next to nothing to gain from doing and there's billions to lose.
Can you really blame them? Microsoft's bad behavior and damage to the computing industry from their documented monopolistic, anticompetitive practices had consequences that are still felt today.
They're clearly trying to change their ways, but every now and then (i.e. patent crap) some of the old regime shines through. It shows that the internal mentality hasn't changed as much as they like to put on.
Nah, people were giving them another chance already. I for one don't 'hate' them, I find Windows (and Outlook and let's not talk about Sharepoint) not a good product and thus not worth the money and with them 'being evil', I did not really understand why anyone would use it. With all the open source and other good strategy decisions by Nadella I was changing my opinion some what. It seems they should take that all the way to make me (and others) to not frown when someone says they pay for their products. Still something is better than nothing so they did become less evil in some respects, however their open source strategy seems about getting devs closer again and devs are some of the only people who care deeply about patents.
> I find Windows (and Outlook and let's not talk about Sharepoint) not a good product and thus not worth the money
This is exactly what I mean. Them opening up the patents wouldn't change your bias against their products (justified or otherwise isn't relevant) like you just described, making it a business decision with very, very limited gains and billions in losses.
Well you were talking about 'hate' which would make me say I don't like the products because I don't like the company. That's not the case; I actually try Windows at every new version because I have to make sure my products run on it, but it's just annoying for me compared to Linux (and Mac OS X); the productivity is just very low. Objectively I have seen that our employees get more productive when they switch to a unix but that's just anecdotal and not interesting here, but it's not because of hate for MS. I would really want to work for MSR and especially on things like [1]. It would not change my bias because they are, to me again, not good products, however there are products they make which I do like and I would be more inclined to pay money for them if they were less evil. And to me (and I believe a lot of programmers) that means software patents. I find patents in general a wrong concept but you need them (especially in the US) to defend yourself against other companies using them or trolls suing you.
you seem to say that windows is objectively good and worth the money, irrespective of their circumstance. otherwise, what could "wouldn't change your bias" mean?
I'm not saying anything objective about its worth. Under some circumstances it has a certain value, under other circumstances it has a different one.
By bias I meant that you flat out said that Windows and a few other MS products aren't worth the money and don't understand why anybody would use it. Now sure, it's possible that after careful consideration you decided in a completely unbiased manner that the products you listed aren't worth their cost under any circumstances but I'm sure you'll agree how that might sound incredibly biased to a casual observer.
edit: well except sharepoint like you said. That thing is just bad and I've no problem admitting to a bias against it.
Why do you want more scrutiny for Google's patents? As far as I know, they have never used their patents aggressively, only as a defense. In an environment containing trolls like Apple and Microsoft, I can't blame them.
Google receives as much scrutiny as Microsoft. What they don't receive is criticism, because it's hard to criticize something that is sitting around mostly doing nothing.
> ...if MSFT gets royalties from these patents it would be irresponsible (to their shareholders, and employees) for them to ditch them...
Continuing that logic, it would be irresponsible not to defend this patent's revenue in court. Irresponsible not to use the most advantageous court for that (i.e. East Texas). Irresponsible to campaign in such a way that might invalidate that patent as it would deprive them of a valuable asset. Irresponsible not to reinvest some of the revenue these parent's generate into lobbyists to protect that revenue stream and asset.
So responsibly to investors again results in a tragedy of the commons. This time in patent litigation and legislation
If you want that to change, support changes in patent law. You can't expect any company to act against its own self interest while other companies take full advantage of the system.
In other words, don't hate the player; hate the game.
If you play the game you end up with an interest in the game continuing to exist.
If you play the game because you have to while working to destroy it, that is one thing. If you play the game and lobby against the destruction of the game, you are the problem.
Even if that was the case, which I don't think it is, Microsoft shouldn't be asking for stuff like FAT32 royalties.
Think about it. Microsoft is asking for royalties for making devices that work with Windows. How crazy is that? Imagine if Google charged accessory makers for hooking into Android devices. I don't care if others do this sort of thing, too. It's just wrong.
It should be an anti-trust issue, especially when you have a dominating OS like Windows. What are other companies going to do - make mobile devices that don't work with Windows?
And remember that it was only relatively recently that they asked for it in the first place. And yes indeed I think it also includes Chrome OS too nowadays.
Why shouldn't MSFT claim patents for FAT? They've developed it and it was adopted by everyone and their mother for being good and cheap FS.
You don't need to support FAT to allow transfer of files between your your Windows PC and the phone standards that abstract the file system like MTP and PTP exist for this very own reason.
If you are as a phone maker want to enable users to mount their local phone storage as a fully writable file system cheaply you just format the SDCard using FAT and pay royalties.
If you don't you can still easily bypass the FAT patent issue by creating your own abstraction layer which may or maynot require the user to use specialized software and drivers (BB manager/itune/kies etc.).
That said for the majority of users MTP and PTP are more than sufficient I have an iPhone now and I do not miss the mount-SD card feature one bit if I'm honest even without using iTunes on a non-jailbroken device.
I can still plugin the phone and transfer files from the camera which is pretty much the only bloodything I could do with it anyhow and for this Apple does not need to support FAR nor pay MSFT a dime.
>They've developed it and it was adopted by everyone and their mother for being good and cheap FS.
No, it was adopted in order to have Windows compability, which you need given the Windows desktop monopoly and since Windows refuses to support any filesystem it won't get royalties on.
The point is, that you cannot use other filesystem, perhaps more suitable to underlying storage technology, like F2FS, because it does not work with Windows.
FAT is actually terrible filesystem. It's only advantage is "works with Windows".
For SD-cards, it is actually mandatory to use FAT (exFAT for SDXC). It's part of the spec.
> If there was a better FS out there that met all the requirements for SD cards don't you think it would've been adopted?
They need to allow users to plug their SD cards into their Windows machine without it being wiped. That requires using FAT. Considering the fact that most Android distributions use far more modern Linux filesystems (ext, xfs, etc), I wouldn't say that the reason they use FAT is because it's "the best FS out there". In all honesty, you can't come close to ZFS.
Not to mention that Windows has poisoned the UEFI spec by requiring that your UEFI boot partition be formatted with FAT. However, as it turns out, this means that they had to give a patent grant to anyone who implements UEFI-based booting (which is why the vfat Linux kernel code is still there).
Why is Microsoft "irresponsible," in your words, if they don't extract maximum value from their patent portfolio, but Apple is a troll? Doesn't Apple likewise have an "obligation" to their shareholders to maximize their value based on your implication?
> But in any case i don't really see the issue here, if MSFT gets royalties from these patents it would be irresponsible (to their shareholders, and employees) for them to ditch them
So it's okay to shake people down over bogus patent claims, as long as your shareholders get their take?
As I said elsewhere in this thread, I really hate how people hurry to come up with excuses for corporations and their representatives acting like jerks. They can take responsibility for their actions just like the rest of us.
> Google owns countless patents and Apple just might be the biggest patent troll in history and none of them seem to receive even remotely the same amount of scrutiny.
Are you serious? Did you not notice the endless derisive coverage about slide-to-unlock, "rounded corners," etc, etc? Apple deserves and gets plenty of shit for its patent trolling. This article, on the other hand, is the first thing I've personally heard about Microsoft patents in years--I'm sure there's been other coverage, but it's certainly not as comprehensive as Apple's.
It's kinda hard to prove because of the confidentiality Google uses in it's agreements with partners, but Samsung was making every indication that they would fork Android, prepping alternatives to all of Google's apps. Then, they reversed course in 2014, they signed a patent agreement with Google and started 'toning down TouchWiz'. These stories were two days apart.
Why would Samsung do this if Google wasn't leveraging it's patent portfolio?
Apple vs Samsung et al.
Issuing patents on silly things like slide to unlock and mag lock even tho those functions existed before Apple has ever used them?
Heck I'm surprised they haven't sue every kitchen appliance in Asia for violating their maglock patent....
Heck the first apple iPhone GUI related suit against Samsung was field before the first iPhone was even on the market.
I wouldn't defend any of those cases, but if that's your yardstick for "biggest patent troll in history", then you have a lot of disillusionment and disappointment ahead of you. There is no shortage of vastly sillier patent cases being won by organizations whose entire business model is "winning silly patent cases", in many cases against people who can't afford to defend themselves, but sometimes against giant tech companies as well.
Big tech companies sue each other all the time over all sorts of stupid things. Everybody is suing everybody all the time and it's absurd that they have to play that game, but that's not even close to the bottom of the barrel of patent insanity. Don't mistake the handful of high-profile cases that bubble to the top of your RSS feeds (or whatever) as being a meaningful sample of what is actually going on in the world, because the reality is so much worse than that.
Can you provide an example of slide to unlock before the iPhone? Also, I (personally) feel that maglock for a power cable is very different from maglock for a refrigerator. (A ticket terminal and a vending machine are very different devices covered by different patents even if they both utilize the same basic mechanisms.)
>But the point is, it is a very trivial way of interacting with a touchscreen. It is, in fact, one of the few ways one can interact with a touchscreen.
I don't get how people can argue stuff like this should even be covered by patents. What's the rationale ?
Did Apple spend billions in R&D to develop this feature it now needs a mechanism to recoup it's investment ? I suppose they wouldn't "invent" swipe to unlock if it wasn't for the patent so they needed extra incentives to make it a viable investment ?
The fact that you can get a patent for something trivial and inconsequential like this shows how flawed the system is IMO.
Who carea if it's novel or not ? Patents are a government granted monopoly defended on the premise that there would be a strong disincentive to invest in R&D if someone could just copy your deaign and a strong incentive for you to not share your invention.
In my mind there is no universe in which Apple dosen't implement swipe to unlock just because it's not patentable - it's just abusing a flawed system (can't blame them for it - they didn't make the rules)
Yes, the Neonode has "slide to unlock", but Apple's patent is for a very specific set of claims; items which the Neonode didn't implement. With Apple's patent, they claim novelty over having a single graphical element that the user needs to move with predefined start and end points. Another claim expands upon that saying there is a graphical arrow showing direction of movement. Another claim says there is help text explaining to the user what to do.
So yeah, on the surface one can easily state "they both have slide to unlock" but in order to discount Apple's patent you need to show that there exists prior art for the specific claims Apple made in its patent. The Neonode is not prior art for those claims.
Funny, I have a slide-to-unlock device on my front door that fits that specification exactly, the only difference is that it is not 'on a computer'. It's a ridiculous patent.
Well, CAFC thinks that Neonode makes the claims of the Slide to unlock patent obvious:
> We reverse the judgment of infringement and no invalidity because the asserted claim of the ’721 patent would have
been obvious in light of Neonode and Plaisant.
This is the one claim Apple asserted. This patent claim states:
> 8. The device of claim 7, further comprising instructions
> to display visual cues to communicate a direction of
> movement of the unlock image required to unlock the device.
That the court found this one claim to be obvious doesn't negate the remaining 14 claims of the patent (excepting, perhaps, claims 9 and 10 that build on claim 8). Of course, it doesn't mean that the remaining claims can't be obvious, perhaps even blindingly so. However, what you can't do is point to this case and say "Apple's slide to unlock patent is obvious"; the best you can do is point to this case and say "Claim 8 of Apple's slide to unlock patent is obvious".
Your original post said that Neonode is not prior art for the claim asserted. The CAFC disagree with you, they used Neonode to rule that the claim 8 is obvious.
> Your original post said that Neonode is not prior art for
> the claim asserted.
That is not true. The phrase "the claim asserted" was not part of my original post; I only used that wording after you replied to my original post with the court case, from which I quoted. My original point (which I'll quote for convenience) was that "Apple's patent is for a very specific set of claims; items which the Neonode didn't implement". Based on the video in the link elosyt posted, the Neonode does not have an unlock image (claim 1) that must be dragged along a channel (claim 3) with visual cues (claim 4) of text (claim 5) and an arrow showing direction (claim 6), etc. etc. Instead, Neonode appears to have an invisible unlock method with none of the visual elements that Apple claims in its patent.
That I was unaware that Neonode was found to be prior art for a single claim (claim 8) doesn't invalidate my original point that there are many claims in Apple's patent for which Neonode doesn't look to be prior art. Finding one claim to be obvious and have prior art does not invalidate the patent as a whole; the other claims remain. From Wikipedia[0]:
> If the independent claim is determined to be invalid,
> however, a dependent claim may nevertheless survive, and
> may still be broad enough to bar competitors from
> valuable commercial territory.
This is why my original post says:
> ... but in order to discount Apple's patent you need to
> show that there exists prior art for the specific claims
> Apple made in its patent.
You'll note I used "claims" in the plural, which was intentional. What you wrote:
> Neonode makes the claims of the Slide to unlock patent obvious
is untrue as it's only one claim in the court case you linked which was found to be obvious. The court case was silent on the other claims of the patent in question and, as such, the remaining claims stand until someone else comes along and challenges them to demonstrate prior art/obviousness. If my legal understanding is incorrect on this, I welcome any corrections.
> I don't know what are you arguing right now
I hope that clears it up. I'm not trying to argue for software patents. I think most of them are actually obvious and silly and amount to protecting something that took an entire minute to think up. That said, if software patents exist then I don't see any reason to not speak with precision about patents, and speaking precisely about patents means discussing specific claims not vagaries about the concept as a whole.
HN should patent the up/down arrows. Not that original but these ones are tiny and don't let you change you mind and I am guessing these is no prior art for that. Also the way it shades the text grey when you get downvoted.
In Asia small appliances had a magnet on the power cable for ages these aren't fridges but smaller appliances like kettles and hotplates and it was added exactly for the same reason that Apple added it to their laptops the only difference is that Asia has been doing so since the 60's.
By the "same thing" you mean unlocking a church door? There is nothing "the same" about unlocking a slide bolt, and unlocking your phone by swiping an graphic which responds to your touch by animating an element of the graphic along a predefined path.
To the contrary, I think it's quite a clever implementation. If somehow inventions like this did not qualify for patent protection, then very little would. Which is a fine argument if you just hate all patents, but if you actually read and understand the slide-to-unlock patent, as far as software patents go, it's not a bad one.
Some specific claims have been found to have prior art, but the patent as a whole is not invalid. And certainly not because of door bolts.
Apple has a handful of patents that are questionable and they're the biggest patent troll in history? Seems like a bit of an exaggeration considering there's an entire industry built around patent trolling. Here are Microsoft's 300 Android patents. All legit?
"Google owns countless patents and Apple just might be the biggest patent troll in history and none of them seem to receive even remotely the same amount of scrutiny."
Patents are like nuclear weapons - they stay dangerous for a very long time, most who have them claim their primary function is to scare others who have them away from attacking them with theirs, but their actual function is to scare and extort anyone who doesn't have them into doing what the patent-holding assholes want. Of course we want to hold anyone who has them under careful scrutiny.
> Patents are like nuclear weapons - they stay dangerous for a very long time
That is not actually true about nuclear weapons; they require regular maintenance. And they are like any other military technology, they get outdated and their designs have to be constantly refreshed.
If a country doesn't maintain their nuclear arsenal, there's a very good chance that they might not work when they need it to. This happened to much of Russia's inventory. This, of course, gets factored into geopolitical strategy.
Yep. People come out of the woodwork to praise MS when they do something that involves Linux, but when they are caught (yet again) doing something anti-Linux it get very quiet.
The reality is there is no new Microsoft. They're just trying to put a shine on a company in decline to keep investors happy. And that's easy to do with good marketing strategies like "Microsoft <3's Linux", while they are still doing the same antics to undermine Linux as they've been doing from the beginning.
Really all that's changed is they got rid of the chair throwing, vitriolic anti-Linux CEO and replaced him with a politician who knows how to work a crowd.
It needs a culture change, and that won't happen. If Microsoft actually wanted to be a part of the free software community, they would start liberating all of their software, one piece at a time. Most of the things I've seen look like business decisions (top-down) not engineering decisions (bottom-up). I still feel that liberating .NET was done to force Mono out of business. Or to attempt to gain a monopoly with C# developers.
Don't get me wrong, more free software is always a good thing. But I still remember the Microsoft of old and no, I don't accept that they've changed their ways. It's just the next step in their line of business decisions.
I am pretty sure the title of this submission is against the site guidelines; it's not the title of the article submitted and the article's title is perfectly explanatory.
The submitted title may not be much better, but the original is pure clickbait. It starts off with "The one thing...", and makes you click through to find out.
The current (written by the poster) HN title of this article claims that the MSFT patents are "bogus" which is surely not true.
Samsung has enough money to challenge them, but they know they would fail, the patents are valid, as long as the US law supports the software patents in the current form.
The best reason for Microsoft to stop leaching off vaguely applicable patents on smartphones is that their best chance at reviving their own smartphone business is with something along the lines of the Nokia X handsets, running Android, but with an emphasis on Microsoft's apps and ecosystem.
That won't fly without access to Google's proprietary apps and app store. Microsoft will need to bury this hatchet before they could get that licensing deal.
They have an SDK for this approach now, with Xamarin. Don't be surprised if they trade the patent revenue for another shot at phones.
> That won't fly without access to Google's proprietary apps and app store. Microsoft will need to bury this hatchet before they could get that licensing deal.
Microsoft could use AOSP or Cyanogen. But is there any known case where Google has blocked a would-be Android phone maker? And if it blocked Microsoft, how would that stand up to DoJ scrutiny?
Google cannot block anyone from using AOSP. But Google declines to enter into Google logo agreements all the time for all kinds of reasons that they often do not explain. While you can self test your device for compatibility, that's no guarantee you'll get an agreement with Google.
Thanks for the info. It would be interesting to see Google turn Microsoft down, but I don't expect it will get the chance. Windows 10 works very well on phones....
I suspect it has a lot to do with the legal deadlock "you'll sue me? I'll sue you!" type situation companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google and Oracle have been so reliant upon.
None of these companies have, to my knowledge, ever used these patents against individuals in the open source community but they sure do love to wield them with each other...
> None of these companies have, to my knowledge, ever used these patents against individuals in the open source community but they sure do love to wield them with each other...
There have been many, many cases of patent trolls doing exactly that. The reason this is relevant to these companies is that patent trolls can buy these patents from a company and then make their money's worth by suing every Tom, Dick and Harry they want. Sure, $CompanyX might not actually be the one suing, but they are enabling this sort of abuse of an already broken system.
I wonder if this kind of behavior is not creating an obstacle for their move towards opening their own software and convincing people to use it outside of the Windows environment. I'm sure all these nice new things have OS licenses that protect their users, but who knows in which direction this will develop. People have become pretty sceptic of the Oracle owned line of technology as well recently.
Sony has its own substantial patent portfolio, which makes a big difference.
That being said, I know from personal experience that many Sony Xperia devices support exFAT, which, to me, doesn't sound like they're showing the middle finger to Microsoft at all.
If I were the writer of this article I would rewrite as follow.
"So why, with all this, am I certain that Microsoft can't be trusted?"
If I want to say "So why, with all this, are many open-source fans and developers certain that Microsoft can't be trusted?", then I would want source to back me up. This is how I want to earn "Trust" :)
I am always saying windows is better OS for desktop users than linux, and I would never trust MS. Why would open source people trust MS is beyond imagination.
As long as litigation is of a positive net present value (i.e. expected return is positive) then they have a duty to their shareholders to undertake it. It's just the way of the world, its not like the CEO is taking into account this when thinking of 'the way microsoft should be' its just the state of tech innovation at the moment.
So, they're not illegitimately strongarming people because they want to, only because someone is paying them to do it?
Is that supposed to make it better?
I really hate how people hurry to come up with excuses for corporations and their representatives acting like jerks. They can take responsibility for their actions just like the rest of us.
>>As long as litigation is of a positive net present value (i.e. expected return is positive) then they have a duty to their shareholders to undertake it.
This is a myth that has been debunked many, many times.
Slightly OT:
"I'm writing this on Linux Mint" must be the equivalent, in the personal computing world, of having a long beard and wearing hipster clothing.
So many are using it but they all think they are oh-so-not-mainstream.
Oh, and just like those skinny jeans, they are probably going to hate it sooner or later.
EDIT: I was referring to Linux Mint, not Linux in general. I would never call a Slackware user a hipster ;-)
It's apparently OK to rip off the best ideas while learning from the mistakes of more then 15 years of work done pioneering by Palm, Microsoft and Apple and slapping them on top of a free OS and just paying nothing.
It's hard to see the difference between the first iPhones and Galaxy phones, in terms of home screen and hardware. You can't tell them apart at first glance. A clear rip-off. The patents Apple used to sue them were often trivial but the fact it was nothing but an iClone was obvious.
Apparently that's the only thing you can do to a competitor that copies without innovating. I can imagine that now Google had a few firsts in Android (interactive notifications for example) these patents will be swapped more and more and Microsoft gets less leverage. That's why Motorola didn't have to pay, they were extremely important advancing mobile technology and have their own chest of patents as a result.
What is interesting is that corporations have implanted this notion that copying an idea is "stealing" and is somehow immoral.
Copying is how we advance civilization. Every great idea was built on the work of others, or "Standing on the shoulders of Giants" as Newton would say.
The current framework for IP protection isn't working. There is no evidence that it is accelerating the pace of innovation.
We need to shift our viewpoint and realize that copying is a good thing.
You should really have a look at the MCAM report cited in the article. All of these are old prior art ridden patents that would easily be defeated if someone took them to court. Barnes and Noble was one company that told Microsoft to Fuck Off. When the trial date approached they suddenly reached a business arrangement where the two companies formed a joint company.
The obviousness bar should be raised much higher so that if a lone undergraduate could arrive at a solution it is not a patentable solution. If we are going to entertain software patents then they should be used to cover major investments, like it works in pharmaceutical industry. Most patents are not of this kind, and most things in iPhone are just straightforward progression of prior art.
And average one, obviously. This isn't an objective measure, but there are similar concepts in jurisprudence.[1] Patent system was created in a different time, but at least to me in the present it only makes sense to use it to protect ideas that necessitated hundreds of man-years of investment by competent teams and not to be used for land grabs for trivial ideas that anyone can arrive at just by virtue of being a pioneer one's field.
