It's a little early to say for sure, but I predict this will do more to hurt Apple's reputation in the tech community than anything they've done before. And that is not a good community to alienate. I would not be surprised if they look back on this move one day and feel that they ended up net worse off as a result.
Apple used to be careful not to alienate hackers. And Microsoft has been gradually digging itself out of a hole in that respect for several years. Now in my mind they are both the enemy.
I'm unhappy with Apple and Microsoft too, but the real enemy is a broken patent system that creates the perverse incentives that motivate companies to launch lawsuits like this one, to the detriment of society.
Regardless of who wins, we have already lost, because we have a patent system that discourages innovation and competition in software!
Maybe the prospect of patent Armageddon will finally force lawmakers to address the issue head on. I'm hopeful. As Winston Churchill supposedly said, "you can always count on Americans to do the right thing -- after they've tried everything else."
Edits: grammar and style; also, added PS and qualified quote with "supposedly," because it's unclear if Churchill ever actually said those words (thanks icebraining and drabiega for pointing that out).
It's certainly true that the patent system is broken. But the fact you can get away with doing something due to broken laws doesn't make it ok to do it.
The operative word in cs705's comment is incentive. The patent system is broken in such a way that not only does it makes possible to get away with this behavior, it encourages and rewards it. That's very different than merely "making it possible".
And the operative word in pg's reply is "ok". That Apple, MS, et. al. are acting in their objective self interest (and to the detriment of all of ours!) is an important point. But it doesn't speak to the moral issue which is that such behavior needs to be condemned and not excused.
If the system incentivizes this behavior, can a publicly traded corporation even choose to ignore it? Would shareholders be able to claim breach of fiduciary duties if they did?
Note: I am certainly not arguing that this is a good thing for anyone by any means at all.
> Would shareholders be able to claim breach of fiduciary duties if they did?
By claim, I suppose you mean sue over? In that case the answer is no. There's this notion that companies legally have to be run so as to maximize shareholder value, and there's some case law in Delaware to support that notion. But what overlooked is the context of those decisions. Invariably the litigation has to do with change of control or measures designed to encourage/discourage same. Outside of those contexts, the business judgment rule reigns supreme. So long as there's no self dealing and the company doesn't lie in its public statements, it is almost impossible for a shareholder to win a derivative breach of fiduciary duty case.
> If the system incentivizes this behavior, can a publicly traded corporation even choose to ignore it? Would shareholders be able to claim breach of fiduciary duties if they did?
Corporate officers have wide latitude in determining what actions are in the best interest of the corporation.
In a case like this, the incentive to initiate Nuclear Armageddon for profit has to be balanced against the cost of making developers hate you and desecrating your reputation and standing in the community. It is by no means clear that starting a war in which all sides are susceptible to take heavy losses will be in the interest of shareholders.
> can a publicly traded corporation even choose to ignore it? Would shareholders be able to claim breach of fiduciary duties if they did?
Patents are a weapon, and if one huge corporation has no "weapons" to defend itself with, then others with "weapons" will attack it. That's why they all have to participate.
In this case, they all - Google included - rushed towards a particularly juicy weapons cache, and whoever got their hands on it was going to use it on the others.
This is fucking ridiculous and disgusting, of course. But it's not the fault of these corporations - they're forced to play, because if one doesn't, then others will just force a massive competitive disadvantage on it. The real problem is the US patent system, the US courts, and the culture of feverish bullshit litigation at every turn that pervades the US.
A cold war is not as bad as an open war. The cold war is caused by the existence of the weapons. The open war is caused by launching the first warhead.
well, that's a tricky calculation. It's possible that Apple and MS have miscalculated the backlash on this, and they will be net losers. As for morality, although I disagree with it, there is a moral case for intellectual property rights. That this absurdity is an outcome of it suggests that there's something wrong with the foundational moral assumptions, but given that people are calling this a "nuclear" case - it's reasonable that many people did not forsee this coming.
4.5 billion dollars. If lawyers are even taking 1% of that - good gosh. So many other things in this world 45 million could be better spent on.
Retaliation against the real parties in interest by the victims, destruction of the business reputation of anyone associated with this behavior and the reluctance of anyone else to implicitly condone it by doing business with them, causing outrage in Congress or the courts thereby spurring them to respond by making changes to the law that destroy the market value of a multi-billion dollar patent investment, ...
The first step in this is speaking up and saying, "Hey, this is really obviously wrong".
Part of the reason that the law doesn't have to get every incentive and disincentive right is because there are other mechanisms available.
I'd like to say that I was going to avoid doing business with these parties, but I already wasn't doing business with these parties, at least not to the best of my knoweldge.
This is a possible disincentive, but it doesn't currently exist. Calling public outrage against patent abuse a disincentive is the same as calling changes to the current patent system a disincentive: they don't currently exist.
I'm not sure what you mean by "don't currently exist" -- there is a general consensus that some form of patent reform bill is going to pass in the not too distant future:
By launching the mother of all trolls to the disgust of the industry at large, they're adding fuel to the fire and making it more likely that stronger anti-troll legislation will pass. Certainly you can expect Google to dump several million dollars more into lobbying for it now. But if that legislation passes and decimates the weaponization capacity of the patent arsenal they just paid billions of dollars for, they've just wasted billions of dollars.
Similarly, the general consensus here seems to be that what they're doing is totally unacceptable. Here where we have the people who choose which platforms to develop for, whose choices collectively make or break those platforms. Yesterday if you had a choice between hiring an extra developer to develop a Windows Phone version of your app or using the money to improve or advertise the Android version, you were more likely than you are today to do the thing that benefits Microsoft. Similarly, if you're Samsung or Asustek or Huawei and Microsoft has just loosed the troll upon you, well, good luck trying to negotiate favorable terms for any of them to ship Microsoft technology in any of their products.
And on top of all of that, how can they not expect Google to respond? If you start a war you can expect the other side to return fire. Maybe not in kind (by setting loose their own patent trolling entity), or maybe they will, but one way or another it's not like Google is incapable of striking back. What happens when they throw a billion dollars into WINE and Samba? Or add support for Kerberos, LDAP and Group Policy to the Google API so that companies don't need Windows domain controllers anymore? Doing things like that probably wouldn't move the needle on Google's bottom line, but it would stab Microsoft in the face. Which is what happens when you make enemies.
> By launching the mother of all trolls to the disgust of the industry at large, they're adding fuel to the fire and making it more likely that stronger anti-troll legislation will pass.
As I understand it, this company was formed during the purchase of the Nortel patents, which happened a couple of years ago. Not just right now. The company which was formed from investment of Apple, Microsoft, etc, is not under their direct control anymore. They basically paid a bunch of money to grant themselves immunity from these patents while creating a hazard / barrier to others.
They intentionally put the patents in the hands of a troll. Moreover, since the trolls generally don't have the capital to buy the patents up front, the transfer deals generally involve the selling party getting a large cut of the shakedown money the troll collects from its victims, so it's quite likely that they haven't recovered what they paid for the patents.
The fact that the timing of this happening at the same time as patent reform is on the table wasn't predictable some years ago is just part of the point -- you can't always predict blowback. The risk is part of the cost.
Weird reasoning. So anything legal and profitable must be done? Even for shareholders I think this can't be true. And anyway it is easy to show that going evil is harmful in the long term, e.g. with developers.
I don't like this any more than the next guy, but it's not like apple and microsoft aren't also getting sued. At some point offense can be the best defense.
Edit: also, apple and microsoft also actually make things. This puts them in a different class than patent trolls like lodsys(sp?)
You're right. It's not just the broken patent system. It's also the present business culture (for lack of a better term), which makes getting away with it seem OK to a lot of otherwise decent people in corporate America.
This is the logical equivalent of, "don't hate the player, hate the game." And it holds about as much water. If any company in the world has the warchest to bow out of petty patent politics, it's Apple.
Apple and Microsoft were part of a consortium. Do we know that Apple was a ringleader here? Maybe they just are along for the ride to make sure that they weren't in the crosshairs? </devils-advocate>
This whole story brings on such a lugubrious feeling. I mean, I guess we can chalk it up to human nature, but, patent system aside:
How did we ever arrive at the place where we believe that everyone else must lose in order for someone to win? How did we get to a point where we believe that we have to take from someone else's plate when there's more than enough to go around? How did we lose the vision that bringing the highest performance, service, features and functionality is "The Right Way" to deliver and compete, instead of destroying ourselves? How did we become so misguided that, even with a broken patent system, we are not intelligent enough and civil enough to simply do "The Right Thing?"
None of this activity is in the spirit of the Hacker Ethos, regardless of the broken system. At what point did we lose our bearing?
I'm reminded of Joshua's observation from WarGames:
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
we are not intelligent enough and civil enough to simply do "The Right Thing?"
With the majority of people, who are generally decent, the honor system is workable. Problems arise with a minority of people who are willing to exploit loopholes and engage in freeloading (e.g., patent trolls). This creates the tragedy of the commons [1]. With the existence of freeloaders, it is necessary to carefully craft public policy to discourage freeloading and rent seeking. Right now the US (and perhaps international) patent system does just the opposite.
This isn't just a human problem, it is one that exists throughout nature. Cheaters, free riders, parasites; just a few names for the same idea: beings that benefit at the cost of others. The problem is that natural selection favours these cheaters.
The best we can hope for is to mitigate the effects of cheating. Attempts to completely stamp out cheating (such as the patent system) are doomed to failure.
The patent system isn't a person or group. It's a weapon of mass rent-seeking built in part by these same companies so that they can reap huge profits without having to actually compete with their rivals. Responsibility for this situation is squarely on the shoulders of these companies and others who have lobbied the patent system into what it is today.
Also, and this is a minor quibble, despite it's frequent attribution to him, there is no evidence that Sir Winston actually ever said that.
> Don't blame the patent system. While it is true that patent system should be reformed/eliminated ...
But thats the point. You can blame the companies all you want, another will always be there to step up and take advantage of it. I do blame the companies, but what does it matter? Are we likely going to see an Apple Boycott? I doubt it, and changing one companies business practices will have little impact on the industry as a whole.
But the patent system - that's a single target we can all align against, whose elimination would solve these issues immediately.
Every system has its exploits, will you blame those systems for their failures? Individuals are always to blame because individuals are the actors in the broken system. The blame must always lie with those doing wrong, or else we're just absolving ourselves of the hurt we cause each other.
I'm a pragmatist at heart is all. I look for the action that leads to the outcome I want, and I don't believe outcry against companies will ever have any impact on the patent system, outside of resultant legislative action.
> Every system has its exploits, will you blame those systems for their failures?
The system is responsible for maintaining the most beneficial incentives possible. In some cases, it is difficult or even impossible to remove those exploits, and in those cases I look to blame individuals to the maximum extent possible. But in this particular example, there is little to no apparent benefit to having (the current) patent system in place, and only perverse incentives. While it doesn't absolve the companies of their behavior, I don't see how it can be viewed as anything other than an inevitable outcome (given the system design). In that light, I may avoid Apple products for instance, but am generally uninterested in any complaint or action that isn't targeted at the root cause which for all intents and purposes can be fixed!
It doesn't have to be one or the other, it can be both. A system that does it's best to prevent abuse, and individuals who do not seek out ways to abuse it, combined make a best case scenario.
Sure I'm completely on board to fix the patent system but it does not follow that I should continue to support a company that I believe behaves unethically. Apple boycott, yeah I doubt it will happen but that's not the point. It's about informing my personal choices and helping to speak out to inform others. Boycott's unlikely to change anything but real change tends to come from lots of people speaking out and informing lots of other people.
Shareholders can and have replaced the Board of Directors of public companies, based on their lack of faith in the company's ability to maximize profits. The Board of Directors is in charge of hiring and firing for the senior executives. The Board of Directors and Senior Executives know this, and aren't stupid.
All that has to happen is that shareholders (which are often other corporations) need to act RESPONSIBLY, and you're right, this meme will die. I expect the sun to go red giant, first, though.
If you are seriously suggesting that Tim Cook would have been ousted had Apple not gone down this road, I think you and the rest of the world are just going to have to agree to disagree.
Actually I think that article points out my take on the matter. For most corporations, its duty is to maximize shareholder value; the problem is that too many people have forgotten what that actually means.
There may not be statutes but there absolutely is case law. In fact, I'm sure there are indirect statutes. There's just no way that the purpose of a for profit company is not to maximize profits to the owners of that company. There may be reasonable debate about where best to deploy capital but those decisions should be justified.
The company's duty is to maximize the value of its shareholder's holdings in the company (i.e., stock). This can be done by maximizing profitability (see, e.g., Caterpillar, most publicly traded companies), but it can also be done through growth (i.e., Amazon, most startups) at the expense of maximized profitability.
It's easier to maximize profitability than it is to maximize growth. This is why more companies pursue the first path.
"Maximum profitability" still needs a timeframe to judge against. Maximum in the next quarter? Next year? Next decade? Maximizing in short term may harm or prohibit maximizing profits in long term, which would be just as bad (or worse) for shareholders.
Profit in the reporting context refers to the annual measure of net income, so maximum profitability generally refers to the profit generated in a single tax year.
Most corporations try to be profitable over a long term, and there is no requirement to be "maximally profitable" in a single year or over any time period. For every corporation there are judgements over the value of investing in product pipeline, sales, marketing etc. or the value of increasing short-term profits at the expense of long-term, the value of taking a risky action that may pay-off or may bring customer anger and lost sales etc.
The vast majority of single actions that a corporation takes are not mandated under some simplistic view of "maximising shareholder value".
What is the timeframe for maximizing profits? If I can liquidate the entire company and maximize profits for that quarter am I required to do so? If I can avoid instigating expensive legal battles and the associated bad PR to maximize profits in the next 10 years wouldn't I be just as required to do that?
A company can have more than one purpose and sometimes maximising profits gets in the way of the other purposes of the business, so just because a business is for profit, does not neccessarily mean that it will seek to maximise that profit or that the owners want it to as they may be just as interested in the other purposes that the business can be put to.
Money alone makes a poor measure of business as business is there to do stuff and money is just one of the processes involved.
What would they do, just let Google acquire even more mobile-related patents? You think Google would never sue them? Let's not be naive, the only reason Google is a good citizen with patents today is because a retaliation would make a dent on them, and they know it.
The parent is right, the problem is the patent system, which gives a disproportional power to the holder and creates these power dynamics, "eat or be eaten". There's no space for ethics or fairness there.
That's not quite true. The newer generation of tech companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) have taken to using patents very very defensively, at least so far.
The problem here is rather that Google chose not to participate in the company buying the patents.
What do you do after that. Leave the companies that didn't pay alone ?
There used to be a time where companies would have been doing just that. But in mobile market, there is no competition anymore, there is a very rough war. 2 market leader (Nokia, Blackberry) have basically been pushed out of the market in less than 5 years. That's like incredible speed ( I work in financial software company, it takes decades of continuous bad strategy to doom a company ). Their error of judgement was all considered minor and the correction they have done should have been more than enough to limit the losses. In addition of that, only 2 players on the market manage to make money, a lot of money.
In that climate, anything that can give you even a few months edge can be the difference between competing and becoming irrelevant.
The smartphone market is brutal - too brutal for regular competition strategies.
If patent system was OK, with their power and money they could always find another weapon if what they really want is to attack a competitor. That said, I don't want to mean that the system is OK, obviously, this weapon surely looks too powerful.
While I agree that the US Patent System is broken for allowing this, Microsoft and Apple have to wear the moral blame for following this course of action.
This may be true, but let's not get fooled into thinking that because "they" are the enemy, Google must be our friend.
Google is playing a very dubious game here, and it has nothing to do with being on "our" side of the patent issue. They've tried to buy the same patents, refused to participate in a joint effort to safeguard those patents for all, and then knowingly violated those patents.
All through this, they've been silent about their motives, and have even tried to mislead the public by claiming they were never invited to join.
There are no "good guys" in this conflict, no sides any of us should be on.
They haven't done it because they don't have many patents. It's easy to act noble about how you'll use your patents when you don't have any. Other commenters have noted that Google is currently suing Apple and others over standards essential patents (no just because the lawsuit started before their acquisition closed doesn't mean anything, they could settle or withdraw their case). Google had the opportunity to join a consortium with Microsoft to bid on the Novell patents, they declined. They could have joined this consortium as well but they decided to bid for it alone. Not only would it have shared the costs among the group, but it would have also prevented each other from suing over them. Google clearly wanted to control these patents themselves so that they could extract licensing deals from others, something that isn't so easy to do when you just have a license for a patent.
Well considering Apple was willing to actually pay a small amount rather than no payment at all, I don't see how you can see them as the aggressor. Motorola clearly stated that they wanted more for it.
It seems like Google had more control over whether that lawsuit was filed than I thought. From FOSS Patents:
>A few months after that Zeitgeist talk, in January 2012, Google authorized a Motorola Mobility lawsuit against Apple over six patents in the Southern District of Florida. The merger agreement was publicly available and absolutely unequivocal about the fact that Motorola needed Google's consent prior to bringing new IP assertions while the merger was under antitrust review.
EDIT: Since it's not letting me reply to your comment, gonna post it here.
If you're talking about Motorola vs. Apple in general now, clearly Apple wasn't the aggressor. Motorola was the first to sue over patents prompting Apple to counter-sue.
You forget that Apple has their own patent suits against Motorola that they are not dropping. Ending the fight would mean that both drop their patent suits. Seems to me that GoogleMotorola wants this and Apple doesn't.
I don't think it's pretty obvious when you cite the blog for a company involved. Google's been fairly cavalier in infringing some patents (Regardless of whether their good patents, Google knew they were infringing). It should also be noted that the biggest Android player apart from Google, Samsung, has taken to suing aggressively.
I understand you to be arguing that it is not clear that Google would, if given the choice, drop all patent litigation (sued and suing), and Apple would not?
Yes, in the Motorola-Apple suit, Motorola was the aggressor and the bad guy. But when Google bought them, Apple had already counter-sued them. That's why I defined the aggressor between Google and Apple as one that is not willing to quit.
They've certainly tried to against Microsoft but they failed. Microsoft and Apple were required by the government to license their standards related patents under reasonable terms to anyone before this Nortel patent portfolio buy was cleared. As far as I know none of them are trying to sue over SEPs. I don't even think this lawsuit contains patents related to standards, but it's kind of a moot point because no company actually has a controlling interest in Rockstar. It's all John Veschi and other former Nortel employees who run their company.
I find your username amusing given the context of this thread.
IBM could stand to make some money by licencing out some of their patents as they have done in the past:
Incidentally if anyone is told their work is to be patented and will only be used in defense - bear the above behaviour in mind, over time, companies will not just use patents in defense.
Ha, it seems I'm a bit late to make that prediction - it's already happened.
This included Google trying to extort absurd sums for FRAND patents.
I don't see how Google gets a free pass because that was its wholly-owned Motorola Mobility when Apple/Microsoft/RIM/etc don't get a free pass because Rockstar is an independent entity.
Google has only asserted patents against people that are trying to attack Android using patents. The previous two comments are absurd. You look at Google's patent litigation record and shit is crystal clear. Patents are being used defensively by them.
But isn't the point being made that this is better not looked at as a good versus bad, it's better looked at as one sort of bad against another sort of bad.
The fact that one of them is slightly better than the other in one regard doesn't change the fact that neither of them are really that worthy of your support.
You're right that Google haven't been patent aggressors up until now but if recent behaviour teaches us anything it's that Google have been very willing to change what they've stood for historically. If you believe that they'd never change that position if they felt it suited them then you have more faith in them than I do.
"The fact that one of them is slightly better than the other in one regard doesn't change the fact that neither of them are really that worthy of your support"
Retaining them defensively isn't "slightly better". Using them offensively is significantly worse.
"You're right that Google haven't been patent aggressors up until now but if recent behaviour teaches us anything it's that Google have been very willing to change what they've stood for historically. If you believe that they'd never change that position if they felt it suited them then you have more faith in them than I do."
That just sounds like weak speculation to me. Patent fee extortion is the sort of thing you do if you have a gradually declining (Apple) or minimal (MS) market share.
Retaining them defensively isn't "slightly better". Using them offensively is significantly worse.
That is only until you study how you use defensive patents defensively.
Suppose that you join a patent pool like http://www.rpxcorp.com/. Then you're sued by a patent troll with no assets other than a patent. How exactly is RPX going to help you?
They used to state it in their FAQ. Then removed it, but I'm sure they still do it. They negotiate with the troll. And to make it cheap, they give the troll what they want. They give the troll another patent, in return for a binding contract to not sue anyone protected by RPX.
(I became aware of this possibility after 3 patents taken out with my name on it when I was younger got sold to RPX.)
> But isn't the point being made that this is better not looked at as a good versus bad, it's better looked at as one sort of bad against another sort of bad.
The direct consequence of this would be a call to get rid of the evil on both sides and abolish the (software) patent system altogether.
I'd like to emphasize a quote from the end of the article:
> Patents have become the arena in which tech companies have chosen to do battle.
There is no longer competition about the best user experience or the best technical solution to an engineering problem but competition about who can file the best vague, yet court approved patent and secure the most destructive intellectual properties. I don't understand why we are still only talking about reforming the patent system.
> There is no longer competition about the best user experience or the best technical solution to an engineering problem but competition about who can file the best vague, yet court approved patent and secure the most destructive intellectual properties. I don't understand why we are still only talking about reforming the patent system.
Seriously?
iOS7 and Android Kit Kat both move user experience forward both in terms of the UI and the functionality offered. The latest iPhones, Android phones and Lumias are clearly better than what went before. I suspect if you asked average engineers at Apple, Google or Microsoft how much of their time and energy is taken up addressing problems caused by patents the number would be pretty small and if you look at how much those companies spend on patents, lawyers and settlements it's dwarfed by what they spend on product development.
To put the giant $4.5bn spent on the patents in question in context (and remember that's was shared between several companies), it's about what Samsung spend on marketing in a year or half of Apple's 5C/5S iPhone sales for the first weekend they were on sale.
Yes patents are impacting the industry but that's not to say that competition about things users care about has stopped, it's just slowing things up a bit.
>> Yes patents are impacting the industry but that's not to say that competition about things users care about has stopped, it's just slowing things up a bit.
I think "slowing things up a bit" is a great understatement. Hackers who could build the Next Big Thing have no chance at success if it takes a billion-dollar patent arsenal to avoid getting sued out of existence.
Who wins this fight is a side issue. The real issue, I think, is that only such giants can compete. If so, we're missing out on a lot of innovation.
A lot of products can be dreamt of that do not benefit the Apple or Microsoft or Google ecosystems. But can they be built without infringing "a navigation tool for graphical user interface?"
And yet most people are somehow managing to avoid getting sued out of existence while still building amazing products in small companies and start ups.
You have a point and I was a bit polemic. Nonetheless those conflicts do reach the consumer in a significant manner, for example last year, when I updated my smartphone firmware for stability reasons, all the rubber band menus vanished and were replaced by glowing edges because of the ongoing dispute. And those patents weren't even applicable in my country. Also remember all the cases where one side was trying to prohibit the sale of some phone or tablet somewhere in the world.
I don't dispute that there is an impact but your example shows the real scale of it. Is rubber banding really such a great loss? Yes it's nice but what's the actual impact on the quality of your experience been?
Frankly most of the patents that have been enforced seem to me at least to have been pretty minor and relatively easy to workaround with little real impact on the user.
To take the counter-argument, do these things really need the protection of patents then? Wouldn't the situation be better for the user if minor innovations of this sort could be borrowed, and companies instead needed to continue innovating in order to differentiate their products?
I could see a short protection period for things like this, but the magnitude of current protections seems extreme.
I agree - my personal preference is for reform of the patent system to provide a higher bar for what can be patented (actively used by the owner in a current product, evidence of significant investment to get there, significantly non-obvious and so on) and a shorter period (three to five years except in exceptional circumstances).
But that's a somewhat different argument - the original point was that consumers were being significantly impacted and I don't think this shows that.
To my mind the biggest impact may be coming from FRAND patents, the terms of which don't have to be particularly fair or reasonable and as such can easily be used to block new entrants. To my mind FRAND patents should have transparent licensing terms which are common to every licensee whether you be a major multinational or a two man start up.
The amount spent on patents and related litigation is massive. There are other large costs as well of course, but the patent fiasco is a large drag on the industry.
Something I'd like to see in addition to the now-pending reform is a law limiting damages to a fraction of revenue related to how the patent figures in the device in question. That ends up looking like a mandatory licensing fee, which I think would be about right for those few tech patents which are actually valid.
When Jobs claimed that Android was a stolen product and that he was willing to go nuclear on it, this is what he meant. And his claims have some merit. It is hard to blame Apple for using legal weapons to go after Google no matter how distasteful the use of such weapons might be.
This is according to some moral code or what? The world doesn't abide a set of moral rules. Rules are made by people who can't win without them. You can't tell everybody to stick it and start entering several industries at once. In the real world you have to be cooperative, as well as persistent, because you are not the only 800-pound gorilla.
When I come to think of it, I might indeed sound like pro-anarchi but I don't share any political or religious views, rather try to accept things for what they are. Rules are nothing but conditioning. Attempting to give moral and ethics questions an ultimate answer bounds that group of people to go radical and crash with reality.
Nothing extreme could ever work. It's an equilibrium with lots of different sides that change their weight with time. Another manifestation of this is the mafia. It is present in every society in History. It's a human flaw. Rather than ignore it and pretend it's not there, maybe we should talk about it.
Understanding other people's position and making compromises is key if sustainability is your primary goal.
Well, if you want to label good guys and bad guys, you need some rules to judge them with. In this case the moral code for me is that software patents are bad and whoever abuses them is in the wrong.
By "refused to participate in a joint effort to safeguard those patents for all", do you mean that Microsoft offered to buy these patents jointly with Google, in such a way that Microsoft would be able to use them to extort Android manufacturers and Google wouldn't be able to use the patents to help defend them?
Because if so that's some pretty heavy spin you're putting on it.
edit: excerpt from Google's official response, linked elsewhere in this thread (note it was in reference to a different bundle of patents).
" If you think about it, it's obvious why we turned down Microsoft’s offer. Microsoft's objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn't fall for it.
Ultimately, the U.S. Department of Justice intervened, forcing Microsoft to sell the patents it bought and demanding that the winning group (Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, EMC) give a license to the open-source community, changes the DoJ said were “necessary to protect competition and innovation in the open source software community.” This only reaffirms our point: Our competitors are waging a patent war on Android and working together to keep us from getting patents that would help balance the scales."
Quite a statement especially on the background of the other companies involved. Any substantial arguments for that?
Until recently, Google had not filed even a single patent lawsuit [1] and so far still has not done so against Apple, MS, and the like, afaik. Meanwhile, the 'rockstars' have been going rampant [2].
Google wanted these patents so that they would not be used aggressively against them. Google has no history of using patents against other companies aggressively. I'm on the side of the company that isn't using software patents to sue other companies, which in this case is Google. This isn't nearly as complicated as you are making it out to be.
> refused to participate in a joint effort to safeguard those patents for all
Source? you're not confusing these with the Novell patents, are you?
Either way, this is the worst case of patent trolling, and may even raise anti-trust issues. Speaking of which, weren't they specifically told not to sue and gang up on other companies when they bought these?
> They've tried to buy the same patents, refused to participate in a joint effort to safeguard those patents for all, and then knowingly violated those patents.
That's a very misleading claim. It's not because they decided to buy a big pool of patents that they necessarily knew that 7 of them would apply to their tech. Moreover it's not clear either that they implemented anything after the fact. Those patents seem to be touching fundamental things like advertisement and search.
That's a big part of the problem, actually. If it was clear which patents they were then they could be specifically avoided. The problem is that there are so many overly broad patents that you can't even know which ones you're infringing until the troll jumps out from under the bridge.
But to answer the question in broad terms, the compiler you're using and the operating system you're running it on will probably infringe something or other in its rather comprehensive standard library or system call implementation, which you've incorporated when you type the equivalent of "#include <stdio.h>" in your Hello World program.
Completely agree with you, that's why I think this whole mess is wonderful news. I like the nuclear war analogy here, and I hope that both sides will hurt each other so bad in this little game that at the end they'll sit down somewhere and say: "never again". Then they'll start doing what all of us expect the Tech Giants to do: start pouring money on patent laws policies to put trolls out of business. It will have taken a lot of wasted money and harm to each of them to reach that point, but better late than never, eh.
There are no "good guys" in this conflict, no sides any of us should be on.
You're mistaken. It is we, the public, that are the good guys. Whatever Google's motives are does not matter. What matters is the outcome and how that impacts the public and the future of innovation.
Right now, it is pretty clear to many observers that the system is broken and having a very negative impact on innovation, competition and the public. The legal and R&D costs associated with patents are inevitably passed on to the public.
Google was invited to join in the group with Apple, Microsoft and the others? Any links or anything I could check out? I tried googling but there's too much about this particular case to find anything useful! I was under the impression that they were never offered to join in.
I agree that this will hurt Apple's reputation, but, in my opinion, this should already have been "priced in". Apple never really repented after the "look-and-feel" lawsuit. Many hackers just didn't notice because they were an underdog climbing out of a deep hole for so long.
Now that the worm has turned and Apple has their do-over we can see that they never changed their spots. They just improved their legal tactics.
Not all members are equal parties and it's not hard to feel that the leaders in this group are Microsoft and Apple. They have the means, the motivation, and both have track record.
Blackberry are in no place to do this, Ericsson haven't been of this nature, and whilst Sony could they have enough distraction going on at the moment to focus their attention elsewhere. I also feel those three would gleefully follow Apple and Microsoft.
It looks and feels, from the viewpoint of a lay observer, to be an Apple and Microsoft effort.
Time will tell though, it may take a while but everything comes out in court, the good stuff and the bad.
The CEO of the firm they set up to do the trolling is also the CEO of MPEG-LA that collects patent fees for H.264 and a few other royalty bearing standards.
It's worth noting that although the lawsuits were issued yesterday, the consortium was finalised in June 2011 when all of the group members were strongly involved in non-Android smartphones.
It's not unreasonable to suspect that this action was planned as part of that formation and priced into the bid.
I find it odd that everybody is speculating Apple mostly and Microsoft when the article specifically states Rockstar is acting independently in this regardless of any former promises made by the consortium companies. But yes, time will tell.
Just like Apple's ridiculous $1 billion patent lawsuit against Samsung hurt their reputation? Oh wait, it didn't hurt them at all and it's already forgotten. You are giving the tech community way too much credit if you think they really care about this, and the average person won't even notice.
I think it might be a bit early to draw that conclusion. Whether by coincidence or not, it did coincide with Samsung's rise as the biggest rival to iPhones. Granted other Android manufacturers around the same time started to compete head to head as well, I think that even if that case isn't at the forefront of people's mind, it was a brick in the wall.
It's important to remember how unassailable Apple felt before that. Any kink in their armor hurts them, and that was a big one.
I know two non-techies who bought Samsung Android phones when they upgraded rather than iPhones because of that trial. Not a huge effect and obviously anecdotal, but these things do have an effect.
However, I think developers are likely to stay with Apple as they have solidly adopted their products over the last 7-8 years, and weirdly many people seem willing to forgive a large company anything, just because they happen to have purchased some of their product range.
People will like Google less and less because you can't do anything without them and there is no alternative, and what will happen to Google is exactly what happened to Microsoft: antitrust lawsuits, patents lawsuits, etc.
This is not because Google is "evil" or anything, just because they are #1 and therefore are target for more and more people.
In the end, this is all for the better because this may help alternatives to emerge as it helped alternatives to Microsoft to emerge.
No, iphone and windows phone are the alternatives to google's > 80% hegemony at this point. Still, google is a far nicer market owner than apple or microsoft ever were. They don't abuse their dominant position, which is why their competitors are forced to take private legal action instead of running to the government for help.
Google doesn't have >80% of the market. Android has >80% of the market. Google does not control Android. Yes, Google provides a lot of services for Android users, but Android works fine without Google services.
Everybody is so quick to forget about "Android fragmentation," but fragmentation is a clear indicator of Google's lack of control over Android.
Only amazon has managed to make a viable usable fork of android that complies with legal requirements, and the amount of work it took them was prohibitive for anyone not on amazon's scale.
Android as OS is open source, but android as experience is very much under google's control. Like i said though, they have been quite benevolent, because they view android as a vehicle to get you to use the google services.
> In reality almost everyone nicely complies with google's compatibility definition, constraining how far they can fork android, just in order to get access to google's closed source apps: https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Google%20Inc....
The point of the CCD [1] is to ensure that new devices can run a test suite that ensures they work correctly with Android as it currently exists. CCD isn't just about Google Play and Google Play Services, its about the fundamental functioning of the OS.
Isn't it more like "they can't abuse their dominant position" because Samsung etc. can just fork Android in that case and go away. Yes, it will take resources but Amazon has already done it.
I don't think they are more responsible, they have to be this way. When given dominance, they also use it to get you signed up for other products. See Google+, it is not is search, you need it on Youtube and what not!
Amazon was in a unique position to do it. MS or Apple could do it too but they have their own backyard to tend.
Samsung is a hardware giant. They suck at software and can barely handle a thin customization layer on top of Android and anyway they seem more interested in flooding the market with hardware rather than consolidating.
The other Android players are not making any money, building the backend infrastructure to compete with Google is a billion dollar type project.
It also takes time to determine what is abuse and what is not. Especially in behind doors deals. The case of Google threatening licensee to lose their license if they ship unrelated product Google does not like would definitively be abuse plain and simple. But as most things people discuss on the net, that's just based on rumors, who knows the real dynamic at play.
Apple and Microsoft and joining to sue Google with FRAND patents, that they bought from other companies, and people will like Google less because of it?
Is that how the patent system is supposed to work, or are Apple and Microsoft abusing it to the extreme?
I choose to not care so much, based on who the parties are.
There is more to life than whether one giant company is suing another giant company. I would care a lot more if Apple used their patents to squash small competitors, but they don't. This is purely a clash of the titans.
I use Apple computers because they are the best computers for me to get my job done. Patent suits don't change that. I use Google search for the same reason.
but say I want a smartphone, what is my alternative?
google, who works harder and harder to sell everything I do to advertisers (now you can't even rate apps w/o a google+ account), and who just shut off transmitting search data so they can screw site owners for more $?
microsoft, who is a party to this and actively worked to make the internet worse (and succeeded!) for the better part of a decade?
or apple, who at least isn't run by and for advertisers?
People bitch and moan about Gmail serving ads and yet people bitched and moaned when Google Apps dropped the free version, even though with paid accounts you don't get ads anymore and the pricing of Google Apps is insanely good compared to the alternatives.
Android, Chrome, Chrome OS are open-source. Amazon already forked Android. Android is also the only popular mobile operating-system that allows installation of software from third-party sources. And if you use Android, you don't have to buy into Google's services.
In my eyes it doesn't matter that Apple isn't being "run for" advertisers. Because Apple sure as hell isn't operating their business in my interests either.
Chromium is open-source, but lacks various functionality Chrome has (e.g. the PDF reader, and soon I expect playback of Netflix videos, since I doubt Google will be open-sourcing their CDM). Chromium is also supporting Flash via NPAPI, not Pepper, which Google is planning to kill off.
ChromeOS has similar issues with Netflix, at the very least: the open-source parts can't do it.
Well, that's true. But then when companies like Mozilla try to fight proprietary stuff like H.264 or DRM (because duh, these are incompatible with open-source), people start bitching about it. And that's why we can't have nice things, because some people suck.
You forgot about the Google Talk plugin, which was something that was upsetting me personally, but hopefully they'll fulfil their promise of moving to Web RTC.
Note - I'm actually a Firefox user, because when Mozilla wants to improve the state of PDF rendering, they do it in such a way that everybody benefits, i.e. https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js
Microsoft earns $10 per android handset, they make more from android than windows phone. So regardless of whether you buy windows phone or android you're paying microsoft. Apple and microsoft have a long-standing patent sharing arrangement, so they don't pay each other money. So, you can pay apple or pay microsoft to get access to a smartphone. Given the amount of patents they hold, any smartphone os is either flying under their radar or in their sights. If firefox or ubuntu succeed with their phone OS, they will get sued.
The problem is not these companies, it's the regulatory climate. Until we defang technology patents it will remain like this, with only a few tollkeepers who own the market.
The problem is not these companies, it's the regulatory climate.
But why is the regulatory climate so problematic? I guess it's because our current form of democracy is highly inefficient - politicians have much stronger incentives to do what rich entities represented by lobbying firms want than they have incentives to do what is beneficial for the general public. Bad laws are basically written by those who benefit from them and that's why it takes so long to change the bad laws and that's why the new laws are always half-assed and full of loopholes. This is not going to change any time soon.
The more I think about it the more I think that government regulation is neither fair nor efficient and I wonder... how difficult would it be to partially escape government regulation by creating a distributed company? Think of Linux on Bitcoins. No single entity to sue. Some kind of self-regulation based on millions of stakeholders carefully disconnected from their real-world identities voting with their money or something.
This is just a very vague idea - I am not sure it could solve anything and I am pretty sure that it would create a lot of new problems but I feel it is useful to think about this stuff because we cannot expect governments to efficiently regulate society in a way beneficial to general public. Democracy needs to improve in order to keep up.
Marketing is a natural occurrence. All companies/people/groups market themselves in one way or another. Your not exactly forced to buy into whats being sold. Why is everyone so stuck on google core being a marketing company?
I think its the least of evil profit motivations since hell I might actually be interested in what google has figured out I may want... Vs being locked out without any options and force into dealing with a certain player.
For me the issue isn't marketing itself. It's that in order to show me personalized ads they need to know a lot about me. They have to compile and store a personal profile that can be stolen or subpoenaed by anyone who is sufficiently capable or powerful.
But I agree that there is a dilemma. The alternative to ad based business models is to make a payment via a credit card, which identifies me even more directly and is subject to even tighter regulation and potential censorship. In the extreme, I have to deal with companies like Apple enforcing their broken moral standards on my phone.
I am quite happy to be served personalized ads from Google and even Facebook. I regularly get ads for services that interest me greatly, like digitalocean, heroku, cloud66, newrelic, edx, codeschool, teamtreehouse. Thanks, personalized ads!
Do you really think Microsoft and Apple don't sell "you" too?
They have (admittedly less-successful) advertising businesses that they show no signs of abandoning, they boast about the number of accounts and/or the number of credit cards they have for developers and partners and so on.
To a first approximation "everybody" wants your money and "everybody" sells you. Generalizations don't work. You need to look at the bundles that come with products/ecosystems on a case-by-case basis.
Google isn't selling me. They're selling a service based on information they get from me in exchange for a product they make for me. It's just another form of payment. Every form of payment comes with it's own benefits and drawbacks.
(I didn't downvote you by the way. I never downvote)
Except it's not as simple as "don't use GMail and you're safe" - they have their finger in every pie via their ad system. You can very, very easily opt-out of using MS or Apple products.
Mozilla is working on your alternative with Firefox OS. We're still very early but there is no doubt in my mind that Firefox OS is going to do to the smartphone market what Firefox did for the browser market, get vendors fighting over users and developers by improving the user and developer experiences and opportunities.
We need a real competitor here with a completely different kind of agenda and, IMO, Mozilla is the competitor to do that. (Yes, I work for Mozilla on Firefox OS, but I'm not just spouting off. It took us a while to get from Mozilla in 1998 to Firefox but we did it and it fixed the browser market. We're getting into phones for the same reason and you can help us fix this market by joining the Mozilla Firefox OS project.)
Right now Firefox OS on ZTE Open is a work in progress. It has tremendous potential, but in case you get one, don't expect the level of polish you get with the popular alternatives. But it's improving and it will get there and if you can, buying one is a good way to support its development.
I would buy Jolla right away if it had a hw keyboard. There may be a FOS device worth buying but I havent seen one yet. I am way overdue for a replacement, and sadly, I need to agree with your parent - there is nothing interesting on the market at the moment.
Well yes, I think with 'decade' GP was referring to everything from the advent of firefox to the introduction of IE9, which might not actually amount to a decade (didn't check). Within this timeframe MS was severely lagging behind in standards, thus requiring everyone to choose between
* support only IE (which they were hoping for of course)
* introduce browser conditionals everywhere
* only use a very limited feature set as the lowest common denominator (leading to table layouts everywhere, using jpg instead of png, never even think about transparency)
This did IMO slow down the development of the web as a whole for quite some time.
By strongly pushing a browser that was rarely updated meaningfully and featured very slow JavaScript and buggy, incomplete CSS support. This held back the viability of web apps for years after they would have otherwise been viable.
Surely open-source handset OSes are just as vulnerable to patent attacks? If Firefox OS were to take off, it would immediately become a target for exactly the same sort of lawsuit.
The question was not how do I buy a smartphone which is invulnerable to patent attacks/lawsuits, but how can I avoid supporting this kind of predatory corporate behaviour (Apple, Google, MS were listed as examples).
I agree open source handsets (as far as they can be) would also be vulnerable to software patent attacks, but we could at least support companies which don't engage in such attacks.
That may be true, but it would be misplaced. I think we should channel our outrage into changing the screwy US patent system so this kind of stuff would become moot.
No. Voting with your wallet works. We need to start treating companies like they are members of our society - if one of your neighbours turns out to be a jackass to your other neighbours, do you tolerate him just because, hey, he just wants to make a profit?
Fuck that. Companies must learn to play nice and it's insane to treat them differently than we treat people. It's a huge double standard and if you expect the system will change without us punishing companies with our wallet, then you've got another thing coming.
Well the problem with boycot is you will find some reason to boycot one of the big players every week. When everyone does their ranking at their yearly smartphone purchase, the whole boycot becomes intransparent.
If there were an association of smartphone vendors, a club of app developers or a federation of tech bloggers, saying "Don't do this or we'll stop to support you", this would work out very differently.
You can meet even large corporations at eye level. Just find their vulnerable points, it's easy.
Well, true, but we also have to adjust our expectations - the patents system will never go away or be fixed until these big companies stop supporting it.
When Apple released iOS as a really locked-down operating-system, I complained about it, but on the other hand it was nothing major. Heck, it was their toy, their hard work, their platform, when other people or companies want something different, more open, more tuned to certain niches, or whatever, then they should work in that direction by building their own operating-system, their own platform, right?
But patents lawsuits are evil, because it prevents alternatives from emerging. It's a really bad loophole that works against healthy competition. Say, Firefox OS takes off, do you think it will be spared?
So that's why right now I'm angry and I think we really should not tolerate patents trolling. It's one thing to acquire patents for defensive purposes. It's an entirely different thing when such a company becomes offensive (and don't think I have forgotten about Google not stopping the Motorola's lawsuits as soon as they bought them).
Why can't we do both? Let the companies know we don't accept their behaviour, and try to change the patent system. The patent system won't change overnight, but the companies can drop the suit in an instance.
Because until the entities, likely to exert huge lobbying pressure on legislation, are brought to heel, changing those laws will prove very difficult indeed.
yes. definitely agree..no one company (including Google) is truly altruistic here..as I said below if anyone we should be rooting for fireOS and not Android/Google.
Apple has been hostile to hackers for my entire lifetime. From suing makers of mac-compatible hardware, through refusing to license their iPod DRM to other sellers, and the unprecedented closedness of the iPhone walled garden, to the ludicrous design patent lawsuit against Samsung. They've always been the enemy of anyone who was paying attention, and this latest move is no worse than what they've done before. I'd like to believe the tech community will turn against them, but the history just doesn't support this.
Google's continued abuse of the FRAND process has done nothing to hurt their image in the eyes of most. And likewise this suit won't affect Apple or Microsoft's reputation one iota.
By dragging out negotiations for years and then trying to use the courts to establish a ceiling (but not a floor) on FRAND licensing costs, I think Apple has done more to undermine FRAND. They've developed a "heads I win, tails you lose" playbook.
Remember, Motorola has been talking to Apple about licensing their FRAND patents since 2007. Over six years later, what do they have to show for it? I bet plenty of companies will start thinking that FRAND and royalty-free aren't all that different.
That's because most hackers perceive Google's FRAND suits as a justified defensive counter-attack brought on by Microsoft and Apple's patent abuse, so they are given slack.
You can be anti-gun person, yet if someone invades your home with a gun, I'd cut them slack of they shot them.
You can be for nuclear disarmament, yet still support mutually assured destruction until that happens. The point of Google using patents is that unless they apply pain to Apple and Microsoft, they will continue abusing the system. The only leverage to bring about reform or a peace treaty is to fight back.
Yeah, I don't like Google using patents to sue people, but let's not kid ourselves why they are doing it, or who fired the first patent attacks.
You're not getting away with that. It's not OK to say one thing and do another. It called hypocracy and it's low and one thing that Google seem to be doing a lot of late. Here's the thing; Microsoft and Apple aren't abusing the system. They are playing exactly by its rules. Lodsys are a good example of an actor abusing the system. Is the system a bad one? That's a different debate.
In an Iterated Prison's Dilemma, Tit-for-Tat and Win-Stay-Lose-Change are both viable winning strategies from a game theory point of view. If your competitor is playing one of those strategies, and you aren't, then not responding to an attack merely guarantees continued loses.
In plain English, you are willing to forgive Google their transgressions because you feel that they are being attacked and you like/work for them, but not Apple/Microsoft for spurious reasons; this being the cognitive dissonance I alluded to earlier. When it is pointed out that this is not the actual case, you claim that that they are in fact being attacked and it's not fair, so they have to resort to the same tactics, which is forgivable because you like/work for Google. Google are as bad as Apple and/or Microsoft.
It's disgusting to me. I'm a bit of an Apple fan boy and i have a ton invested in the iOS/Mac ecosystem but this really pushes me further away. I'm really close to switching to Android and linux because of issues like this. Sure there are worse things a company can do but I have a real issue supporting a company that behaves in this manner.
Let's do it. I'm in the same boat... long-time OS X user and iOS dev. But I am not putting up with it anymore. OS X has been enough of a headache for development that I am ready to move to Linux for that alone, but this is just icing on the cake. They are actively pushing me away.
I love the way it was a group of 6 or 7 tech companies who bought the patents but you choose to single out apple. Was there a reason for this in particular ?
I love how people are so defensive about this patent suit because Apple is behind it. Any other tech company doing this without Apple would have been mercilessly attacked.
I'm not too sure. People have very short memories and attention spans. Companies are callous one day and in a few weeks most people cannot even remember about it.
Interesting that people can have such a different view on the same information. Since the first iPhone came on the market I always read articles that Apple would be alienating the hacker community. It also makes sense because they are mostly bought by hipsters who don't know as much about tech as they want to make others believe. I have no experience with Apple products, though. Therefore my information might be completely wrong.
If you make software, you are likely in the exact same position as Google. There's no reason Apple couldn't sue you with the same broad patents. And while it's obviously unlikely that they will sue you, the fact that they did sue their competitor over these over-broad patents should deeply trouble you.
I doubt it will do any such thing to either company. The article states that Rockstar is acting independently and regardless of any promises that the consortium made (which includes Apple and Microsoft) that they are moving forward.
How dare they! And how dare Linus Torvalds "dump" Linux on the industry, or Mozilla "dump" Firefox. They should be required by law to charge high fees!
I wouldn't rush to that analogy. Microsoft dumped IE and we mostly agree that that was kind of dirty. From another angle, Google is trying to leverage one monopoly in order to break into another, and they did it by poorly copying the iPhone.
There aren't really any "good guys" in this picture, but I at least give Microsoft a nod for trying (and failing) to do something different.
There really are good guys and bad guys here. Lumping them all together is false equivalence.
Google isn't "dumping" by giving Android away for free. They have a different business model, and it makes money. It also keeps the competition sharp. Nothing wrong with that.
What's shitty is that Microsoft and Apple are doing everything in their power to delay and destroy innovation for their own benefit.
Google's actions have accelerated innovation. Android has been good for customers, good for Google, and good for the industry.
Innovation happens when people can build on the efforts of others, and has been so for the entire history of man. Any system that puts up road blocks to sharing and propagating ideas inhibits innovation.
The justification for patents in software as providing shelter for inventors to work on their inventions while releasing the details of how they work is complete and utter bullshit and has been so for a long time. First, the way people share inventions in software is by publishing papers in journals, at conferences, or by shipping software, so that their peers benefit. No I know of has ever used a patent database or patent pending database as a search engine for knowledge sharing.
Secondly, software is shipped and revised so fast, and the time for patents to be granted, and successfully litigated in court, is so long, that more than enough time already exists for inventors to recoup their investments. It could take a decade or more to go from software patent application to successful litigation, so the idea that the patent protection is needed to shelter you while your startup executes is nonsense.
As far as I can tell, software patents serve one purpose and one purpose only: to inhibit and restrict competitors, or to shakedown successful companies with deep pockets.
These were defensive lawsuits and you know it. When you're attacked by patent trolls, the only option is to counter sue with a similar patent troll attack. Think mutual assured destruction nuclear style. But I'm sure you're aware of that and just being disingenuous to make your point.
IE wasn't released unbundled from the OS as source for anyone to fork, so it's a false equivalence. If IE was released like Firefox/Mozilla was, no one would be complaining.
It was bundled, not dumped. But the bundle had more impact than an independent "dump". So, by substance if not by form, it is a comparable analogy. MS did not want to get shut out of desktop browser. Goog did not want to get shut out of mobile browser. They were both playing the same move strategically. Give away that which my enemey needs to sell to survive....
MS could not get shut out of the browser desktop market, period, there was zero chance of that ever happening, since they controlled the platform, >90% of the market. iOS is a locked down ecosystem, if iOS wanted to block Google ads, or change the default search engine, they could do it and Google would have no recourse. Big difference.
Note, Android allows Firefox, even as a default browser for opening links. That's impossible on iOS and on Windows RT.
I don't have any problem with people shipping free software, even Microsoft. The issue is whether consumers and developers have choices.
Microsoft didn't get in trouble for "dumping" IE. They got in trouble for trying to make IE an integral component of Windows which would have made other browsers unusable or unnecessarily cumbersome to use.
No, Google wanted a platform that prevented Microsoft and Apple from completely controlling and owning the onramp to the mobile web with two dominant proprietary operating systems that prevent third party software installs without approval, a huge huge reduction in freedom even comparing it to Microsoft in the 90s. And in that regard, they did the world a favor, regardless of whether it was selfish or altruistic.
It doesn't matter how you try to downplay it. Google shipped a huge useful chunk of kernel changes to Linux, plus a mature, ready, out of the box piece of open source that anyone can fork and use as a foundation to make another free OS, like FireOS, Tizen, FirefoxOS, etc, and they successfully got a platform deployed on a huge number of devices around the world that don't completely lock down who can install what.
Even if they had completely evil motives, good has come out of it. If you're a rabid fanboy who wanted Steve Job's platform to have a monopoly on mobile, it's depressing for you, but it's liberating for everyone else.
Google wanted a platform that prevented Microsoft and Apple from beating them to control of the next big advertising platform.
Nothing more, nothing less. "Open" has been shown conclusively to take a back seat to monetization. It is as much a marketing tactic (in the sense that it's useful to promote the platform, but can and will be discarded, with spin to explain why, when its usefulness decreases) as anything in Microsoft's or Apple's ads.
And it doesn't matter how you try to downplay it: companies other than Google have, whether they intended to or not, accomplished undeniable good through things they've shipped. Apple, for example, has contributed monumentally to LLVM, which is a large and useful public good. But it did so more or less explicitly to screw the GPL.
So, faced with all the major players doing this in some form or another, how, precisely, do you plan to rank them relative to each other in order to discern which one is "good" or at least "least bad"?
I give Apple props for for their contributions to LLVM or WebKit (and OpenCL, and Darwin), no one is saying they haven't done any good things for the ecosystem, but that doesn't erase the egregious damage that the iOS T&C impose on the ability of people to do what they want with their devices. To me, that ranks them lower. That, and the aggressive "thermonuclear" offensive litigiousness they have, not just on patents, but even going back to the Look-and-Feel lawsuit of the 90s. I'm an Apple fan boy when it comes to their hardware, I've owned every Apple device, I own an iPhone 5S, the A7 is remarkable. I love the hardware, I hate the closed nature of the platform, the fact that I need to jailbreak my device to have ownership of it.
For the average consumer, control of "the next big advertising platform" is a meaningless abstraction, it matters to people in the ad buying business, not consumers who generally don't like ads in the first place, and tolerate them mostly to get free stuff. And how does Android "control" mobile web advertising anyway?
But for the average consumer, telling them they can't install App X on their device that they spent $300 on because Apple censors don't like it is much more direct.
No company is perfect, but I can say as a Googler, your cynicism is basically wrong, that open source isn't just a marketing tactic, but that the rank and file at the lowest levels of the company, culturally believe in it. Google has disappointed in the past on the degree of openness, and there is much to improve, so I am not uncritical of it in this regard, but if you were to query the rank of file of Microsoft and Apple with regards to open source, and Googlers, you'd find a lot more zealots at Google.
The world isn't black and white, it's shades of gray, and some are just a much brighter shade of gray than others.
I'd go so far as to say that Windows RT is more open than iOS-with Windows RT you have built in Windows Explorer, and command line access. And a non crippled browser (desktop IE 11 vs mobile Safari).
Given the context of this discussion, it must be mentioned that LLVM license do not include a patent grant. Apple has patented several frontends of LLVM, and is likely to have several patents on the core parts of LLVM. Apple could do a oracle at any time.
"and is likely to have several patents on the core parts of LLVM"
While I work for Google, and was involved in the CPTN and Rockstar stuff (and thus can't comment on this article at all, though I wish I could), i can actually point out that this statement is not right.
First, companies that wish to contribute to LLVM are asked to non-assert patents involved in their contributions. This is covered in the dev policy, and has been for a long time. Their are non-assertions/grants on file for a number of companies now.
As for whether Apple owns any patents on LLVM core, Chris Lattner himself told me Apple held none, which is why they had not filed a non-assertion.
Apple may or may not hold patents on LLVM code that is not "in tree" (so yes, they may have non-public frontends or backends they own patents on), and I never specifically asked about the clang frontend, but I trust Chris enough to know that if there was in-project code, be it clang or core or whatever, he would have followed the dev policy and Apple would have non-asserted them.
While thats nice and all, Apple has made no binding or even public statement to that fact. They also have at least one patent which mention LLVM by name (Converting javascript into a device-independent representation), even if that "just" is a frontend.
There is simply nothing that prevents apple from using patents against LLVM users. We can only hope that none of their numerous vaguely written patents cover any technology used by LLVM or any of their frontends like Clang.
Exactly which part of investing billions of dollars acquiring and developing a technology and giving it away for free, lowering the price of consumer devices, needs to be prevented?
If they've discovered a business model that enables them to invest, develop and freely distribute their own tech to end-users benefits, they should encouraged, not a victim of established cartels using their cash war-chest to buy B.S. patents that they can use as anti-competitive weapons to legally attack their competitors instead of competing against them technically in the market-place.
>> Exactly which part of investing billions of dollars acquiring and developing a technology and giving it away for free, lowering the price of consumer devices, needs to be prevented?
The part where it ends up eliminating competition and results in a mono culture?
It's called strategy, and from Google's standpoint, it's a brilliant one. Seems to be working very well for them, while keeping competitors at bay.
With regards to Schmidt on Apple's board, you're not the first to mention it here, as I responded to another comment, Apple was really dumb in this instance. Google bought Android in 2005, Apple brought Eric Schmidt onto it's board in 2006. So, either Apple was hoping to get some insight into what Google was doing with Android and hoping Schmidt might slip up, or they just shouldn't have brought an advisor on who was the CEO of a potentially major competitor. I was always amazed that that happened.
Google Buys Android - 2005 http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-08-16/google-buys-a....
Schmidt Joins Board - 2006 http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/08/29Google-CEO-Dr-Eric....
I'm sure Steve Jobs was aware of that potential conflict -- he was pretty shrewd after all :). It's was probably along the lines of "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."
Plus he wanted the iPhone maps at launch, and probably a few other things which he could only get from Google. Steve had been around the block, and screwed many people over himself. His outrage was calculated.
Apple threw down the gauntlet when they made it clear that their devices would be a walled garden where they would have absolute control over what apps you can run.
Prior to Android, your choice was between your carrier overlords and the Apple overlord. Not only was that limiting for users, it was a vulnerability for Google business-wise to have their direct competitors as gatekeepers between their services and their users.
But with Android, the choice is between your OEM overlords and the Google anti-fragmentation efforts overlord. Yes; you can flash your own ROM and switch to CyanogenMod or Replicant. That is the freedom you are guaranteed in Android. But how many people actually take advantage of it?
I take advantage of it. I love it that I can take advantage of it. I also helped about 5 other people take advantage of it, by installing Cyanogen on their obsolete phones (I'm not from the US and down here people keep their phones longer than they should).
What you say is a classic logical fallacy. Do you repair your own car? Personally, I like having the freedom of doing repairs on my car outside of "authorized" repair shops, even though I know nothing about cars.
You forget about "Unknown sources". In practical terms that is substantial freedom (see: Amazon and other app stores) that makes Android phones qualitatively different from phones with an overload (OEM, carrier or otherwise).
They are really evil people. Probably as evil as those who created OSes, languages, browsers, protocols, libraries, compilers, IDEs - and gave them away for free. If not for the "rest of the software industry", everything would be in ruins now due to evil commies that dare to give away software.
> Google threw the gauntlet when it took a billion dollar investment into a mobile OS and gave it away for free.
Seeing as how MS sold Xbox consoles at a loss so they could sell expensive games, I doubt MS has much of a leg to stand on with this claim. Apparently, the Xbox One is the first Xbox to be sold at a profit or break-even from day one; this was such a bold move that Forbes devoted a whole column to it: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/06/microsoft...
(Other articles indicate that most consoles are sold at a loss. I'm picking on MS because it was mentioned in the article as a party to this suit.)
> hurt Apple's reputation in the tech community than anything they've done before
They're not the ones suing Google. Rockstar's a separate entity with its own corp leadership that has incentives to find ways to recoup their investment.
>Apple used to be careful not to alienate hackers.
Google and their monopolistic practices and their anti-competition ploys is what has alienated more hackers than Apple ever will.
>Now in my mind they are both the enemy.
The only enemy is Google. They completely disregard intellectual property of others and attack everyone else's revenue streams by offering free products and refuse to pay IP licenses for anything.
Google's the most evil corporation today and it's sad that you, of all people, don't see it. Look closer Paul… they're the big brother everyone warned us about!
Anytime I see the latest "outrage" on HN, I laugh and remember us, citizens of my country that want to protest as long as they are not required to personally sacrifice too much.
Most of these companies depend on you hackers (I do not write code) to be successful. If you decide to pull your apps from the app store, stop buying their products and write a post telling everyone why you made the move, they will be hurt. Even if the embargo is for one year only!
But of course that will not happen. No one likes to be inconvenienced personally. It will mean loosing revenue. Other people (the EFF)should fight the battle. You donate your $10 to EFF and believe you have fought the good fight.
Nothing will come out of this. Google will band with a few chaps on the other side (Facebook Twitter etc), a few hundreds of millions will be spent on lawyers and they will settle in one way or the other. After all, they are working together on other schemes (just like the politicians).
Of course, Facebook will one day eliminate all privacy settings, or Google will put ads in our inbox and there will be outrage again.
Of course nothing will come out of it.
I try to limit my outrage these days. I suggest you should too.
> Of course, Facebook will one day eliminate all privacy settings, or Google will put ads in our inbox and there will be outrage again.
As I was explaining in another comment, if you or other people or other companies don't like something, they can always build something better. If that something is good and provides more value to some people than the popular alternative, then it will take off. That's how the free market works, that's how Android became popular.
Patents lawsuits on the other hand are a loophole of capitalism, preventing the emergence of competition. I haven't been worried in a long time that Windows is still king of desktop operating systems, because Windows is no longer relevant because of technological disruption. I'm not worried if Facebook eliminates all forms of privacy controls, as teenagers are already preferring other platforms precisely because of privacy issues (e.g. who wants their grandma to see their drunk-at-party photos?). But what if Facebook will acquire enough patents as to nuke all alternative social networks?
Now that's a reason to worry. And this outrage is entirely justified. I also don't like your apathy and your cynicism. All the freedoms and luxuries you enjoy today come either from technological disruption, or from people that were outraged and that decided to do something about it. I also don't understand your position on this matter - if you agree that patents are bad, then your cynicism does nothing else but to waist other people's time.
> All the freedoms and luxuries you enjoy today come either from technological disruption, or from people that were outraged and that decided to do something about it.
"Decided to do something about it"
I am against "outrage" for outrage sake. If you are outraged but not willing to do anything about it, then it is worse than ambivalence. You are wasting energy and reducing the value of outrage as a deterrent.
Outrage would be a useful if it resulted in action. So anytime there is outrage, the offending party would retrace their steps. Because they would be aware "shit is about to go down!"
So if the first time Twitter/Facebook/Apple indiscriminately fucked over developers, out rage resulted in something that affected them, things would have been different today.
>I also don't understand your position on this matter. if you agree that patents are bad, then your cynicism does nothing else but to waist(sic) other people's time
I am against the abuse of patents and this is an abuse of patents. I am hoping my "cynical post" will offend hackers (who have leverage) enough to say "how dare you say I am all talk!" and take action.
Personally, as a web developer, I never liked third-party APIs, I stayed away from proprietary platforms that are hard to replace, always preferring open-source alternatives or alternatives based on standards, I use Ubuntu Linux on my workstations, I encrypt my documents that I store in Dropbox and I use Facebook & Twitter with great care.
I also prefer Android both as a user and as a developer, in spite of Google's disregard for Romanian developers (i.e. we can't sell apps on Google Play, we can only distribute free apps), but that's only because with Android you're not tied to Google Play. Plus I'm rooting for Firefox OS taking off, as even with 5% of the market, it will push things forward by developing and standardizing new web APIs.
I disagree completely. Protesting against these things (i.e participating in the latest outrage on HN and elsewhere) without sacrificing your entire livelihood is exactly the right thing to do.
Being cynical about these things is what changes nothing, or rather it changes things for the worse. In countries where everyone is resigned into the idea that every government official is always going to be corrupt and every company will always be criminal are usually very poor.
This isn't a war that is won or lost in the short term. We're all in this for long haul, we have to live with it and still try to move the balance in the right direction.
> Protesting against these things [..] without sacrificing your entire livelihood
If you invest your time and money into say, an iPhone application, you're heavily supporting the Apple store.
Once you've done that, the fact that you've expressed your disagreement with Apple policies on online forums is more or less irrelevant.
Look at Facebook: there is a rather large number of people complaining about their privacy policies, yet they keep making them worst every year. That's because people complain, but don't quit.
I don't have an app in the App Store (partly for these reasons) and I have actually cancelled my Facebook account in protest. I can afford to do that.
But what I'm saying is that depending on your field of work, you may not have much of a choice other than to support the dominant players in the industry. No one should feel under any moral obligation to forego 50% of their income every time NastBigCorp X does something nasty.
It's useful to protest and still keep doing what you do. Maybe down the road there's an opportunity to hurt them without hurting yourself even more. Protesting shows there is a desire for something different.
however it is enough if a small minority takes action and great things can happen even then. for example gnu and linux.
ive not seen many people who can be inconvienienced and use linux freedom software all the time. but ive seen some. they have made a change, not yet visible for the masses but its there.
its those few who take the first steps. i think you should too. do it. even if its only you.
i did that many years ago and couldnt be happier now.
I know it's been said before, but to reiterate: outrage doesn't help anything, but buying products from these companies DOES hurt. If you're truly outraged enough to want to take action, take action
- writing to your representatives
- donating to the EFF or other organizations
- by not donating another $2k to Apple for a new Mac*, implicitly endorsing these bullshit tactics
- not developing for those platforms (App Store, etc)
Leaving comments here expressing outrage isn't really helping.
"Don't buy Macs" is not going to work well around here. Most HNers develop software on Mac and see it as the ideal development platform. I'd say they don't care about what Apple does (it's not the first time Apple does that either).
I'm honestly starting to regret choosing to learn Objective-C now. I am seriously considering learning Android development and ditching my Macbook / iPhone for a Nexus 5 and some sort of linux distro. People like me are making this whole situation significantly worse by contributing software to Apple's platform.
This comment is ridiculous. The big players have been playing a patent chess game since 2007. Don't forget Google bid for these patents as well and it's completely ignorant to think they would have not exercised their billion $+ purchase.
Google took the initiative a year ago with their Motorola patent portfolio, Samsung took the initiative with their FRAND patents, Apple took the initiative with their design portfolio, Microsoft took the initiative by funding SCO and suing android OEMs and now this conglomerate is taking the initiative with the Nortel patents.
This is a war with many players willing to stifle the industry until this gets sorted out. All players are responsible, but this terrible system requires that you get involved and are proactive in protecting your intellectual property.
Go sell your mac and get an ultra book. Go learn Java and ditch obj-c. But do it because you prefer those products, not because you think you are taking the moral high ground.
Google says a lot of things. But they've shown time and time again that they're willing to ignore their past promises and do whatever they feel is in their best interests at the moment. Remember "Don't be evil"?
Even if they were sincere when they said that, I fully expect that they would have changed their minds within a few years of actually winning. Remember, they've already shown a willingness to use patents offensively.
I disagree, microsoft tried to destroy linux by coercing companies to pay a bogus linux tax. Microsoft also footed the bill for SCO's case against Linux. MS' record is atrocious here.
Motorola Mobility sued apple in 2010. Just last month Motorola filed a motion to reopen their case against Apple.
Again, all of these companies are deeply involved in this game of patents.
As far as I know Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2011. So they had nothing to do with the original suit. As for last month's one, I don't know about the details.
If I were to blame one company for undermining standards, it'd be Apple for consistently refusing to license standards-essential patents and Obama for protecting Apple. Remember, the reason all their other competitors have so many standards-essential patents and Apple have essentially none is because the other companies worked to develop those standards and Apple just came along years later and took the benefit of their work for free whilst suing them over dubious software patents.
What's the point of putting in the work and money to actually develop standards if someone can walk into your industry, take all that work for free, and use their non-FRAND-licensed patents to stop you from selling anything? Far better to forget standards, abandon fundamental technology work, and spend the time and money building your own non-FRAND patent warchest instead.
Apple has a fair number of standards-essential patents as well, but they have not been used in a lawsuit to date. These include networking patents (notably zeroconf) and are always made available by Apple via the following statement:
In the event that the technology discussed in the Document becomes an IETF standard (the "Standard") which is not materially different from the Document, Apple agrees, upon written request from a Party to negotiate outside of IETF to make available a non-exclusive license under reasonable and non-discriminatory ("RAND") terms and conditions under such claims of the Patents that are essential to implement a product compliant with the Standard (a "Compliant Product").
These RAND terms and conditions may be conditional upon a reciprocal grant or defense use.
However it has yet to demand reciprocal grants of design patents from others for licensing.
The company has not refused to license SEPs, it has refused to license them with a cross-patent agreement that includes their design patents, as their view is that SEPs should be offered on fair monetary licensing terms.
That does not necessarily mean their stance is right (or that Apple is innocent because they're quite clearly not), but it's a lot more complex and defensible than you've implied here.
It's only partially about taking the morally high ground; I'm afraid Apple is going to start losing significant market share.
i.e. I always hear of friends and colleagues who switch from the iPhone to Android (and not vice-versa). And from what I've seen Google is also actually making significant improvements Android's API instead of Apple's method of just making aesthetic changes (and some argue making it worse).
You must be kidding if you think iOS 7 is just aesthetic changes. So Apple iOS engineers took one year leave and left their designer colleges update iOS 6 to new look?
UI
Inter-app audio
Background fetch
P2P (arguably, this isn't a new feature, it's essentially a wrapper to dns_sd)
Airdrop
Significant KitKat changes:
*Actual* SMS/MMS API
Storage access framework
Printing framework
Plus, Inter-app audio and Airdrop are essentially wrappers to P2P (which is also a wrapper to dns_sd), so the only real added feature was background fetch.
You could say the same about KitKat (except for SMS), so really it boils down to this:
iOS 7:
UI
Background fetch
KitKat:
SMS/MSS API
Which Android still wins, IMO.
Plus, Android already has way more features than iOS already, not to mention the ability to install unsigned software, NFC, custom lockscreens/launchers and who knows what else.
Both are mature OS, ground breaking features are not expected. I'm not familiar with Android, but iOS tends to introduce new and improved API in each release that makes app development easier, there is lesser need to go down to core OS to develop your app. Beside what you mentioned, new in iOS 7: TextKit for fine typography control makes it easier to write text layout and editor; SpriteKit which is higher level framework for writing 2/2.5D games; game controller framework for standardise interface to game controller; 64-bit support; Open GL ES 3.
But seriously: This isn't an issue that'll be solved by buying one product over another.
(I mean, if I understand correctly, this could impact your ability to actually get your hands on a Nexus 5 (or later) device if litigation either prevents them from being produced or makes them too expensive for Google to make. That's the whole point, right? To take the power to choose financial winners and losers out of the hands of the market. To make your decision matter less. That's one big reason it's shitty: It distorts markets regardless what you as the consumer want.)
It's an issue with how our government treats patents like this. Buy your Apple product if that's the best one for you. Enjoy building with Objective C. Or work with Google's products. Whichever you want.
But.
If you're interested in changing this situation, I'd try recommend trying to get the attention of the one organization that really holds the power, here: The United States government.
> If you're interested in changing this situation, I'd try recommend trying to get the attention of the one organization that really holds the power, here: The United States government.
Well it's certainly easier to vote with your dollars than to change the state of politics. Politics are relatively stable in short-mid run, and even a large group of citizen has very little power to change that unless they get representatives of their own to run for and win elections with a clear no-more-patent-bullshit agenda.
Good thing you realize it now. Better now than later. Do take action if you are serious about the philosophical implications of your work.
Anyway, we can see that even in the absence of Steve Jobs, Apple is certainly serious about "going nuclear on Android". They'll follow their former leader's thinking even beyond the grave. That's sad.
Probably because they can see what happened with PCs happening again. If they don't fight android with everything they have now then in 5 or 10 years they might not have the chance.
Their market share is already going away progressively. There's way more Android devices being sold than Apple ones nowadays. They still have a clear edge on tablets, but for how long ? I can't see how Apple's growth can be sustainable unless they come on new segments (just like they did with the iPhone and the iPad in the first place). Fighting to the death on existing segments is not going to cut it in the long term.
All of this assumes that Android is Windows and that another open source platform, such as Firefox OS or Ubuntu Touch, wouldn't be available to pose any challenge to Android. The mobile sphere is probably dynamic enough to support such changes.
If the FOSS projects in mobile work hard enough now, they can eat into Android's market share, at least in the developing world. We shouldn't consider Android's position to be unshakeable.
The groundwork for these measures was laid a long, long time ago. Many of the patents Apple has used against Android OEMs have gone back to the mid-90s - when Apple v Microsoft was recent history and their inability to get "patent-like protection" from UI copyrights was fresh in Apple's mind.
It's basically big corps trying to shoot down each other,it's war. It will not end google search,dont worry,worst case google will have to pay a few billion but they can afford it.
Remember these corporations are using patents as nuclear dissuasion tools,we are not really in patent trolling here.IMHO Google is not better than the rest.
However, what the original commenter is saying is that he is trying to make an impact against this action by not giving his money to the companies that are taking this action.
Your attitude suggesting that company revenues have nothing to do with the actions of the company is simply suggesting that people don't vote with their dollars, or maybe that they shouldn't, which is wrong.
Corporations exist to make money, if they make decisions you disagree with, you should not spend your money on their products. You should do what you can to let them know that reason x,y,z is the reason you're not spending your money with them. Enough of a groundswell and that will change.
Interestingly in this case, if a large enough mass of people bought Android phones specifically because of this lawsuit, that is a double-wammy for Apple and Microsoft in the mobile space, and it gives Google a few dollars to pay for the patent suit.
Google paying a "few billions" will impact their company as a whole: a few billions lost, means these billions are not invested somewhere else, and patents may have other insidious consequences, such as restraining the internal innovation at Google because of past experiences with Patent trolls.
And as I said in another post, Google has a different stance on patents. So far, they pledged not to use them in an aggressive way. Maybe they'll change their mind in the long run, but they have not been very aggressive in that field so far.
I can't speak for Android, but the Nexus phones are nice and Linux can make a stellar developer environment. What with Android no longer being an ugly step-child, it's a good time to make the switch.
If it makes any difference I'd say Android development is mostly a lot more logical and sane than iOS, particularly now that Apple is shoving the tragic catastrophe of an API that is AutoLayout down everybody's throat. Don't let the fragmentation FUD scare you.
But we should all just accept that Google does no wrong by listening to a perennial Apple troll? Do me a favour! That's the problem with you open source terrorist; it all black and white. Google as just as bad as everyone else. They are not doing this out of altruism! If they were, we'd have the source for the Google apps on android, the search algorithms and web apps and they'd all be BSD, not the cancerous GPLv3! They really don't care about your silly ideologies. They care about revenue. That comes from advertising, which requires spying! For fuck sake man, THEY WORKED WITH THE NSA!!! They are pulling the same trick that Microsoft did with nascent IT departments; they convincing you that they are your friends. Hell, they already fucked consumers by giving power back to mobile companies. What is with you people? I frankly cannot believe the utterly childish language I'm seeing; especially from the likes of pg! I suppose you'll be telling me that Samsung are an example of a morally upstanding company next.
What do you mean by fragmentation FUD? Are you seriously saying that android isn't more fragmented than iOS?
There are 5 resolutions to support in iOS. For most purposes, there are only 2 versions to support. What's the situation like on android?
Just because you don't understand an API, doesn't mean you should trash it. Writing APIs is hard. Last I checked I couldn't have more than 1 map on a screen on android with massive trickery.
I've developed several iOS and Android applications professionally and I've actually spent more time dealing with device-specific issues on iOS than Android. It's true that you do have to deal with different form factors and resolutions in Android but the tools the Android SDK gives you to deal with these issues are so vastly superior to what Apple offers that it comes as a wash in typical cases.
I've been writing software for a living for fifteen years now and I've yet to encounter a more opaque, complex, and unpredictable API than AutoLayout.
Screen resolution is almost meaningless on Android. Form factor is what matters. Phone (1280x720 being the floor for remotely new devices), small tablet, large tablet.
Macs may be better, but this has gone beyond healthy competition. This is not right, and we must do what we can to stop it.
Deploying this patent portfolio offensively can only postpone innovation. It's bad for customers, it's bad for the industry, and I'd argue it's bad for humanity.
Coincidentally, Google released Android 4.4 today. It brings a modern browser with much improved battery life to older, less capable hardware.
This is a win for people of average means, and it extends access to the world's information to people in developing countries that wouldn't have had the opportunity on more expensive hardware. Would we be where we are today without Android?
Use the patents as a defense against patent troll attacks. But when you become a patent troll yourself, you are now the enemy.
Fuck Apple. Fuck Microsoft.
I will do everything I can to avoid their products, even if the alternatives aren't as good. They're both a net-negative for humanity.
Google's been abusing patents for a while (notably FRAND patents). Where was the outrage then? Why is it suddenly horrible for other companies to use patents against a company that has a history of abusing them?
With the exception of iOS developers, I think that most developers would find that development is actually much nicer in Linux than it is in OS X.
The amount of pain involved in setting up a coherent development environment in OS X is almost comical after setting up an equivalent in Ubuntu or Fedora.
I don't know, whenever you bring Linux as a development environment around here, you see more HNers bitching about it and saying they "switched back to OSX" after trying it or something. Maybe it's worth making a poll or something.
>The amount of pain involved in setting up a coherent development environment in OS X is almost comical after setting up an equivalent in Ubuntu or Fedora.
For what kind of development? Web dev is pretty damn straightforward and pain-free.
Well, setting up a working Rails install involves, among other things, installing homebrew, xcode, xcode command tools, apple-gcc42, and then manually symlinking all your gcc binaries to the homebrew versions rather than the xcode versions, for example, then making sure that you get certain binaries compiled with certain compilers, lest everything just break horribly down the road, at which point you have to manually rip it all out and re-do it the right way, because accidentally invoking the wrong gcc binary will hose your whole install. Homebrew makes it work, but you're basically at the mercy of this third-party package system to keep things working, because the OS itself is broken for this kind of work.
Apple not shipping anything that is GPLv3 means that you have to rely on homebrew, which works great except for when it doesn't, and you end up six hours deep into troubleshooting it. We've run into numerous edge cases where things don't quite work right in OS X, even though it's ostensibly still a POSIX toolchain. The number of hacks, workarounds, and kludges in our OS X environments far exceeds that which our Linux environments have to deal with.
It's by no means impossible to set up, but it's a hell of a lot more complex than it's ever been for me on Linux. I run both a rMBP and a Fedora machine, and development/experimentation is a lot easier on the Fedora machine, because the whole OS is actually built around the concept of a sane package manager and standard library/compiler toolchain, and isn't crippled by licensing pathologies.
I have a different approach: Every project gets a clean slate in the form of a fresh VM with the most compatible linux distribution (usually Ubuntu server). OSX is not great as a POSIX developlment environment, but it's a good host because of its hardware integration / support. For the project I'm working on now I even went a step further and created a docker image to run inside the VM, in order to get it ready for rollout.
I've never owned a Mac, and the last time I used one was in 2004.
> ideal development platform
The other day I wanted to apply the hqx filtering algorithm to some images, with proper handling of transparency. The code I found for this [1] uses the DeVIL image library. After some apt-cache searching, I found that I could do this:
sudo apt-get install libdevil-dev libdevil1c2
I challenge you to compile this program on a Mac. Not as easy, is it?
> they don't care about what Apple does
I certainly do! Due to the fact that you have to pay a non-refundable fee to the App store and it's hit-or-miss whether your app gets accepted or stays accepted, I've decided to develop mobile apps exclusively for Android.
I guess you may have a point. The recent spate of postings regarding the HealthCare.gov website, which contain numerous comments about the front-end website and proceed to conflate that with development of the entire system lead me to believe a solid percentage of HNers live in a "all development is web development" bubble.
Really until I moved to the Valley I had never really seen people I'd consider "hackers" or "programmers" writing code on anything other than a linux or unix terminal, or in Visual Studio, Eclipse, or some other IDE on Windows. I was actually shocked to see Apple products be so ubiquitous in programmer circles.
Outside of the "web development is all development" monoculture parts of the Valley there is a wide world of software development and developer communities who would basically laugh at the notion that Mac is an "ideal development platform" (some would guffaw at the notion that it's even an adequate one) for anything other than the Apple App Store ecosystem (where it isn't really ideal so much as mandatory, if one wishes to not break laws).
I'd make this conjecture: the vast majority of software development, in the Valley or otherwise, isn't done on Macs; it's really a very small subset of developers who prefer it, and that subset consists mainly of web app and iOS mobile app developers. If the majority of HNers develop software on Apple products, all that means is that HN's primary developer demographic is a tiny subset of the overall industry.
Yep. I didn't mean to imply that all webapp development was done on Apple platforms, either. In fact, what I really meant, but worded poorly, was that it's really a very specific subset of the developer "community" that: a) thinks "all development is web development" and b) "web development" is ideal when done on Apple platforms.
My experience mirrors what you have explicitly stated--most development, web app or otherwise, isn't done on Apple products.
Well to be fair then it should include google/motorola as well in the boycott... their hands are not clean either. Motorola has lawsuit against Microsoft/Apple on standards essential patents. folks should go buy fireOS phone/develop for it etc...looks like they are the only clean ones of the bunch.
It is good, but have you seen the lack of storage? I am sure I have USB keys with larger storage, and I have more MP3s than will fit on its storage. It is abysmal.
They're pretty upfront about intending you to use Google Drive for your storage. So you should focus your critique on explaining why Drive is inadequate.
Actually, Apple was really dumb in this instance. Google bought Android in 2005, Apple brought Eric Schmidt onto it's board in 2006. So, either Apple was hoping to get some insight into what Google was doing with Android and hoping Schmidt might slip up, or they just shouldn't have brought an advisor on who was the CEO of a potentially major competitor. I was always amazed that that happened.
Conveniently, there is a bullet point list of 5 items in the middle of that article. You are free to disagree with any of those points: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Incorrect. If I read the article, and then dismiss the content simply because it was written by Rob Enderle, then that's ad hominem. On the other hand if I notice the article is written by well-known-fool Rob Enderle and don't bother reading it, then that's just good time management.
Note for the last headline:
"Rob Enderle, an industry analyst whom Dell hired to consult on the new entertainment strategy, said he is still discussing with Dell whether profits would come mainly from the subscription service or from devices tied to it."
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:exd_wDD...
Please, make it stop. Make it stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP. How many billions of dollars are these companies going to flush down the drain on legal fees that could be better spent doing just about anything else?
>When Wired visited Rockstar's Ontario headquarters, it found 10 reverse-engineering experts, working daily to take apart products and find patent infringement.
>With just a few dozen employees, Rockstar is hoping to convince more than 100 technology companies to pay it patent licensing fees for a huge array of products. "Pretty much anyone out there is infringing," said Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi.
I thought it was impossible to be more of a douchebag than Intellectual Ventures, but apparently, there's a new winner in town. It was obvious when the Rockstar bid won and you looked at who made up the group, what was going to happen.
I used to get really angry and outraged when reading stories like this, but now I'm just resigned. Patent reform isn't going to happen and this kind of predatory and unethical abuse of the system by sharks and parasites will continue as the cost of doing business.
"I thought it was impossible to be more of a douchebag than Intellectual Ventures, but apparently, there's a new winner in town."
What Rockstar is doing is very shitty, but IV takes the cake because they're a non-practicing entity. It's one thing to sue competitors for making products similar to your own, it's another to make no products and sue people who dare to make something vaguely encroaching your vaguely defined patent.
But that's exactly what Rockstar does. From the article:
> Part of the company's strategy is avoiding a patent-countersuit by not having any operating businesses. Essentially, Rockstar wants to enjoy the same advantage patent trolls have, even though it's owned by direct Google competitors like Apple and Microsoft.
Rockstar acts as a firewall, sure, but the parent companies make things. IV made a mosquito-killing laser that no one could buy, then allegedly got down to business by flicking individual patents to shell LLCs and suing indie app developers for using iOS's in-app-purchase APIs. Classy.
I think RockStar is even worse because they are an NPE that is a sham front set up to further the anticompetitive business interests of two of the largest and most dominant companies on the planet. That's all the evil of a patent troll plus extra ...
No. By market cap, Apple is the largest company in the world, full stop[1]. Microsoft is number 7, having spent much of the 90's at #1. Google does not rank at all. So at least by some definitions these companies are indeed the largest in the world without qualification.
Market cap is one indicator. You can also look at full capitalization, ie debt plus equity. Or you look at number of employees, or total sales. Also, quoting your Wikipedia article: "Some state-owned companies are far larger than even the largest public corporation. For example Saudi Aramco's value has been estimated at $10 trillion, which is twenty times the size of Apple [...]."
Anyway, Apple and Microsoft are pretty big and dominating in their industries. No doubt about that.
Hang on a sec, if the patents are found valid, and Google etc. are found infringing, then they have s/broken the law/failed make appropriate agreements so that they are then allowed by the owner of the monopoly defined by the claims to use the defined invention, and are now liable to a civil suite from the owner of said patents in order to exercise their exclusive right granted by the ownership of a letters patent/.
s/Breaking the law/Using patented inventnions/ is OK when you're Google, but an abomination if Apple/MS do it I guess? Obviously Google knew the value of the patents, and clearly knew the contents, and if it's found they continued to infringe them, then they're getting what's coming to them. If it were small companies without the resources to discover the patents they might be infringing it'd be a different matter, but this is absolutely not the case here.
Edit: law ain't broked, but Google et al potentially open to exclusion of the use of the inventions defined by the exclusive patent right.
You don't understand how patents work. Patents allow you to prevent someone else from selling a product that is covered by your patent. But to do so; you have to get a court order and show that the product in question is covered by the patent in question. It's not a question of whether the defendant is doing something illegal; it's a question of whether the rights the plaintiff asserts are valid.
Of course, once the plaintiff has won an order; defying it is ... ill-considered.
Right you are, a small slip on my part. To clarify for anyone playing along, a granted patent doesn't make using the invention illegal, but it does mean the owner of the patent how the right to a)exclude you from using it if they so choose, and b) they may also seek reparations due to potentially lost income from someone making use of their invention. (as well as other stuff)
That reminds me "if you're a honest person, you need no privacy". It's not like there are tons of bullshit patents on everything on Earth from hyperlinks to rounded angles. Of course if you're a honest man you have never to fear from bullshit patents and the words "patent troll" mean just a character in Discworld novels who is a troll and makes living my analyzing patent applications.
... if they're not infringing, then they have nothing to worry about. Are you kidding me?
I'm sure their infringing. Hell, I'm sure I've probably written some software somewhere along the lines that infringes on some patent this company holds.
Developing software with patents around is like pirating media. You just have to hope you don't give anyone a reason to come after you.
Calm down. Google didn't break "the law". Intellectual property is covered by civil law. One party has to prove that a contract was broken, a patent misused or other IP misused. They also have to prove their damages. They do this in court and if they make their case then the other company has to pay for those damages. It is not a crime. It is not breaking a law. This is not a semantic issue either. It is a civil matter.
Somebody please show me a single patent on software or a so called business-process that is worth anything (i.e. not obvious to somebody skilled in the art).
Just one... I'll shut up then.
Patents were supposed to encourage innovation, now they are doing the opposite (at least for software and business processes) and causing billions of wasted dollars and fat bonuses for patent lawyers.
This move seems a bit desperate to me. To avoid fair competition on products, MSFT and Apple are using patents that they did not even invent. Pathetic and despicable.
I'd like to second and amplify this comment. I've been searching for a single example of a software patent having ever been used to protect and promote innovation, rather than to just stifle competition or extort money from people who happen to build a successful business.
If someone can provide a single instance of a software patent being used as a vehicle for promoting the arts and sciences, advancing the state of technology, or providing a means for a small inventor to bring a product to market that otherwise would not have been viable without the patent, I would be enormously grateful.
The RSA patent, 4,405,829, was pretty innovative and also quite useful, although even it had been invented in secret a year earlier by the British.
That said, I don't think there's any evidence that the existence of the patent system prompted its invention, and so I wouldn't call this an argument in favor of patents.
US Pat #4,200,770 Diffie Hellman public key exchange
There are literally dozens, maybe hundreds of good software patents out of the 500,000 or so that have been issued.
We'd all be much better off without any software patents at all but it's not true that they are all fraudulent and abusive like the ones in these lawsuits. A small fraction are decent. Of course the innovations involved in those few patents would all have been discovered and published without patents as an incentive, because that's how software works.
But the rationale for the patent system is to encourage innovation that wouldn't have happened without it, and it isn't clear that either of the public-key crypto patents qualifies. In each case, the inventors included academics (Hellman was on Stanford's faculty) whose job is to innovate and disclose their own innovations. (And while it's common these days for academics to patent and try to monetize at the same time, that wasn't always so. It was rarer, and sometimes controversial, in the 1970s.)
The RSA patent made R, S, and A very rich --- but it isn't clear what it did for the rest of us.
Haha, when you have to sue your competitors to stop them from totally crushing you in business, it's game over, you have already lost.
To be honest patents don't protect shit and their only value is in protecting oneself from pointless litigation by losers. The only way to protect your margins from attack by the competition is to have a naturally defensible product that derives it's value from the very nature of its use. Google search is naturally defensible. No one has their code (NDAs FTW!), and no one has the cash or the competence to build the computing infrastructure to serve that code. Microsoft Office/Windows was naturally defensible thanks to the network effects generated by third party applications on the platform, until the Internet/Linux destroyed that by being cheaper and faster. The iLine of products from Apple was naturally defensible for the same reasons as Windows, until Android ate their lunch, just like Windows ate Apple's lunch back in the 1980s. Apple also cried like a bunch of babies way back then and sued Microsoft for eating their lunch using GUI patents.
> History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
-- Mark Twain
If you're in the tech world you’re mantra should be: innovate don't litigate.
Apple and Microsoft, you have just shown that you'd rather litigate than innovate.
Whenever that happens in the tech world that means that you are done.
"Pretty much anyone out there is infringing," said Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi.
Well, that's pretty damning. If it's true, then it indicates that the patents never should have issued in the first place. If the overwhelming majority of "Anyone out there" managed to independently re-invent these alleged "inventions" without reference to the patent, then that seems to point out that whatever inventive step may have been involved was obvious.
That is microsoft's story, however if I recall correctly, if google were to have bid with the others, the deal was structured such that they couldn't protect android partners. So the lawsuits against android would happen anyway with the difference being google sponsoring the patent trolling against its own android OEMs.
The patent system has been out of hand for a while but the big corporations haven't complained too much about it because having huge patent portfolios themselves allowed them to build a virtual moat around their business units.
If things go nuclear and they start hemorrhaging even more legal fees, they may begin to exert more pressure to change the system.
Given some of the recent proposed legislation, hopefully the tide is turning against filing patent lawsuits as a business model.
I don't think any of the recent proposed legislation is intended to address a situation like this, where all the players are large companies with deep pockets.
Good point. Although this particular case highlights one of the key problems in the entire system. Shell corporations with very little assets are established as the suing entity in order to shield the much larger and wealthier owners from any counter-suit liability. If that aspect of the current system were changed and you could pierce the shell corp to get at the real beneficiaries, it would alter the landscape for these cases significantly.
What really sucks is how established multi-billion dollar companies are able to oppress smaller innovative ones from competing by simply using their cash war-chest to buy-up broad patent mine-fields around them. It especially sucks this is being done to stifle the momentum of one of the highest-growth markets the world has ever seen.
Patents were meant to protect the innovator, instead software patents are being used to legally harm competition they can't compete against technically - hurting everyone except the status-quo.
Small companies that have done something new aren't buried six feet under a lawsuit, they are bought out and become Google YouTube, or Google Maps, or Google Blogger.
Yes they may be forced to sell or sell for less to avoid patent lawsuits against them, but they sell for more than if they didn't have any patents themselves.
It isn't an idea situation, but patents still generate a ton of income for small inventors.
It isn't an idea situation, but patents still generate a ton of income for small inventors.
But is this income generated for a good reason or just because ..."patents"? Are these small companies getting paid because of the good work they've done or because they've managed to fake enough to get some patents useful in a war-chest of patents for a larger company down the road?
It's not just software patents, it's all patents. The current 3D printing technologies making a big splash right now were all invented in the 80's. The patent minefield just beginning to expire is what's causing the 3D printing boom.
"Google bid for the patents, but didn't get them. Instead, they went to a group of competitors—Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony—operating under the name "Rockstar Bidco.""
I feel like with those initials, they could've operated as "REAMS" instead. From Wiktionary, ream: "(slang, vulgar) To sexually penetrate in a rough and painful way..."
This article is very emotionally loaded. Containing a lot of phrases designed to evoke an emotional response: 'Nuclear', 'DEFCON 1', 'Attack', 'Shocking'.
It actually doesn't mention what Rockstar is suing Google for (i.e., whether it's monetary compensation, banning the sale of products, etc.) The article seems designed to get fans of these companies to react.
I think this will play out as a much more boring, lengthy, and anti-climactic fashion than this article implies.
But OH MY GOD it's APPLE and MICROSOFT, didn't you see that? It's literally the devil incorporate trying to DESTROY GOOGLE who have NEVER done anything wrong ever!!! How dare they use the law to their own advantage! and besides, APPLE have never invented anything at all and stole it all from Google even before Google released it!
It's like saying. Person A murdered person B, but person B did something shady in the past (maybe murder, maybe he stole a dishwasher or maybe he was jaywalking), so it's all Ok for B to get murdered. He had it coming.
Patent racketing is always bad. I don't care who gets fucked over by patent racket, even if it was the Devil himself, the snake from Eden, he still needs a fair trial.
As an engineer, I'm repulsed by the whole deal, to the point of feeling sick about it.
I'm going to get a lot of negative posts about hyperbole, but no, I legitimately get red in the face and get a headache whenever I think too hard about the patent wars. It is our fucking JOB to build things, to move technology forward, that is at least, my entire reason for being what I am.
so in my eyes at least; fuck the patent system; fuck the american built system for repressing innovation for "corporate protections." We all argue about whether it's a "better or worse" solution but at this point, when I spend 99% of my time hearing about the billions spent on suppressing innovation rather than supporting it, it makes me realize I want little to no part in the system that motivates this.
I will have no part of it. My code will be open. I will build things that I care about, and give them to the world, and hopefully work at a place that repays me for that (as I have found now.) Consider this my very ill-placed manifesto to in my own endeavors, support innovation, not the ill-gotten-gains of the future holder of my patents.
(I'm not sure if I put this here to get it out there; or for comments; or for thoughts; I think mostly I just feel that it needs to be said, although perhaps unnecessarily alongside an ocean of similar replies :P)
Non-Americans watching this - make sure you organize however you can to stop the American disease spreading to your country. Watch your politicians carefully for any sign that they might want to implement their patent systems in your country. Good luck.
'One patent filed in 1997, for a "navigation tool for graphical user interface," describes a way of navigating through electronic documents. Another describes an "Internet protocol filter," and a third patent describes an "integrated message center."'
Well with earth-shaking innovative patents like that I hope they succeed.
I would never have thought of an integrated message center for anything.
...a third patent describes an "integrated message center."
This is just comically ridiculous. The only benefit to Google being the target of this suit is that if it goes all the way, there is a chance that some of these might be invalidated because at least they have the cash reserves to stand and fight (if they choose to do so).
reads half line description which outlines not a single important feature of the patent Yep, obviously these are shippy patents, I better not read them!
What a joke, this is why I always get angry when reading anything about patents on HN, everyone is so uneducated and seemingly proud of it.
I actually used to read patents when they came up in the news (as much as I could understand them anyway, patent English is, ironically, not the clearest language).
However having done so quite a few times with tech patents and finding them to be pathetically simple / obvious (Or unintelligible due to the cryptic patentese) I am now jaded enough that I do dismiss them.
Should I? Probably not, I am sure there are a few diamonds that I have dismissed, however I am pretty confident that statistically I am not missing much.
So? Filing a suit does not some how lock it into going forward. Plaintiff can stop it at any time. Motorola's suits are still going on because that is what Google wants.
Like many have said already; how do you vote with a wallet when there is not so much choice. I need a new laptop; my macbook, after many (by apple and by myself) repairs, is falling apart. It's fast enough, but just broken. So I was going to get the 13 inch retina, but now I'm rethinking my position. But what is the alternative... I haven't seen much yet. I want long battery life, i7 4th gen, 13 inch and at least retina resolution. So Pixel, Ativ 9 pro, Yoga 2 pro, ... ? But I also don't want Windows; I don't want to pay for it. Problem... I know the thinkpad t440s has long battery life, i7 4th gen, linux can be installed(still pay for windows), but the resolution (& GPU) are simply too depressing.
The tablet + phone. Firefox phone; I'll get one of those. Tablet? Are there any which you can buy now?
I really would just like to see Ubuntu on everything; tablet, phone and laptop, but I guess that's not really an option. I say Ubuntu because it's the most obvious; when Ubuntu is on there I know I can replace it with another Linux and I can customize it at least.
Like someone said; we cry here, but we all buy macbooks anyway. While a lot of us have the power to actually change things. If 100.000 people ask Lenovo for a Linux laptop, it'll probably come. Besides MS pressure (which is probably 100% of the reason) I wouldn't see why they wouldn't all offer the choice. It's just not popular enough; check any video on any startup site on HN: everyone has macbooks.
This is nothing less than an attack on technology, innovation and engineering. They could try to compete by building better products and matching the level of openness of their competitor but they'd rather keep their platform closed so they can gouge their customers and use lawyers against anybody that doesn't.
We live in a world where inventors can't build anything that get's them noticed by large established competitors without risking frivolous patent lawsuits on obvious concepts.
My Apple fanboy friends always try to argue how Apple's hardware and software are superior, as if that'll convince me that I should buy Apple gear.
I keep explaining the same thing: I know Apple makes the best stuff. I don't avoid Apple because of quality considerations. I avoid Apple because they're screwing up the industry, an industry I use for both my career and my hobbies.
Looks like Rockstar will be this generation's SCO. It's almost exactly the same tactic as last time, except now Microsoft isn't even bothering to hide its role.
At the risk of downvotes & personal dissonance (I love Android and Google search), I'd like to posit an alternate filter to apply to this news.
Given (a) Google's inexorable rise and domination of more and more parts of the Internet & mobile [0], and (b) the unwillingness or inability of regulators around the world to apply any kind of checks to its scary clout, could this - Rockstar - be a kind of defensive mechanism from the industry itself?
I'm not saying that Apple, Microsoft, RIM etc. are suing Google out of a greater sense of responsibility towards consumer choice, but can we not - as external observers - view their action as a countermeasure to one competitor's overwhelming clout?
This is a survival tactic for the consortium. If you look at the bunch - all of them have hardware businesses with margins that are getting continuously eroded by Google's "free by ads and cheap manufacturing" model. If they don't make it expensive for Google to erode mobile margins, they won't last long in that market. The 0.01 Billion in bidding difference they got the patents with is quite suspicious too.
The real pickle stems from all of the money feeding the patent trolling business. That industry needs to die a quick death, and instead it is getting fed by the buckets. Who knows where it will spill to next (killing fledgeling hardware/internet of things firms?).
Wow, what a dog move. The fact they're using Google's attempt to bid for the patents originally against them is even worse. If this isn't justification for serious patent reform, I don't know what is. The fact the consortium that owns the patents is comprised of Google's main competitors in many spaces should immediately ring alarm bells for any judge. This move surely must be anti-competitive, I hope Google fights this all of the way to the top (they've got enough cash).
The patent system probably added more value 200 years ago when the dissemination of knowledge was not nearly as easy or cheap as it is today. The reason for this, of course, is technology.
Looking at this situation from a very meta- perspective, I find it fascinating that what's effectively happening is that the patent system is seeking to undermine the very technological forces that have made it less relevant. Almost like watching two different species compete against each other in nature.
> "Pretty much anyone out there is infringing," said Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi.
And that's the single best reason provided to end software patents once and for all.
When everyone is "infringing" without even knowing it, without reading the patent or without trying to copy someone else's work, you should stop, take a step back, think about things, and realize the entire system is fundamentally broken.
Or if you have no soul, file a lawsuit and hope to make lots of free monies.
Are technology companies eventually going to become like cell phone companies (or oil companies) where everyone sort of agrees that they all suck, but "oh well, what are you going to do", or will some company become the de-facto "conscientious choice"?
I feel like there's at least a bunch of "companies" on the software side of the equation who I don't feel shitty about supporting, but I think the problem will be with hardware.
Ha. Didn't catch that! I wonder what percentage. Google could get some percentage of any potential judgement against themselves by buying RIM. It's like the M&A version of an option spread play.
I suspect all parties to the Rockstar trove have equal rights to the patents (and unequal royalties). Buying RIM would make the lawsuit null and void, unless RIM agreed that their rights can't be assigned (eg to Google) upon purchase etc.
Anyone have more knowledge on Rockstar and know how this would all work?
1) For all the talk of Microsoft and Apple "abusing patents", it was actually Google that had to pay 14 million in damages for actually doing just that. Let's just not forget that before deciding who should be "alienating the tech community". However, Google's PR really is very good, and unfortunately, most people here accept it without critical thought because it confirms their biases.
2) This is business, and business is war. Giving away Android for free was a direct attack on Microsoft's and Apple's business model. They are simply responding in kind. Most people here root for Google simply because they give away tons of really cool stuff for free, and/or because they seem to be "more aligned" with free/open source, which appears to be the dominant religion 'round these parts. However, people elsewhere would see this as perfectly natural.
3) Google is very weak on the patent front, and they know it. So while they hustle to buy up patents from all sorts of sources, they simultaneously try to spin the patent system as "broken" and their own moves as "defensive" in an attempt to reduce their disadvantage in the long term. It may seem counter-intuitive: why simultaneously buy patents and work to weaken their value? Because buying patents is just a short term defensive move. In the long term, Google would be perfectly happy to not have a patent system at all because all their competitive advantage is locked away in their data centers. This is a luxury Apple and Microsoft do not have. They put out products that anyone anywhere can copy, so they would prefer having a patent system.
4) As mentioned below, Google had an option of joining the consortium, but decided to go it alone. Drummond's blog post says it would not have helped Android, but that is very shallow reasoning. They could have always joined in and negotiated the rights to indemnify Android vendors in exchange for contributing a lot more towards the winning bid. Maybe the consortium would not have agreed to it -- we'll never know, because Google peremptorily declined to join in. But I have no idea why they though they could outbid a consortium of multiple giants in the space.
5) As mentioned in TFA, there is some truth to the argument that Rockstar is actually independent of Microsoft and Apple. I know of patent trolls that have funding from e.g. hedge funds, but operate entirely independently. Heck, IV is a perfectly good example. They have funding from Google themselves, and yet they turned around and sued Motorola!
Now, allow me to address your theory: You posit that this may invoke the ire of the "tech community" and this would be a disadvantage to Apple and Microsoft. Some questionable assumptions:
1) The tech community in general has a similar world view as the HN (or is it SV?) bubble. Trust me on this, HN is an enormous echo chamber. If you ask software engineers outside this bubble -- which is, you know, most of the world -- about patents, you'll get three responses:
a) "What's a patent?" (No, really.)
b) "I don't mind patents."
c) "Having a patent as an achievement!"
2) The tech community, even if it does by some remote chance share your world view, won't care. This is business as usual, and has historically always been so.
Now you may move the goal posts and say that by "tech community" you mean "the good ones", the "hackers". Again, I'm not so sure. Consider the NSA revelations: All the comments on HN are rife with outrage. Yet would you believe, even for a minute, that the NSA does not have the best of the best?
Edit: I really do not wish to come across as supporting one company over another, and hope to maintain a neutral tone. I think all the companies involved are perfectly good companies to work for, and perfectly justified in what they're doing. I'm just trying to present a perspective that is somewhat lacking in most comments so far.
No. Apple created a new Market at great risk and expense, and Google entered a it with a rip-off product. On the other hand Microsoft sacrificed three years to create an original product to compete fairly. But since Google didn't incur the risk and costs of creating said market and designing an original product, Google (supported by its search monopoly profits) could undercut them by dumping on to the market Android for free. And so Apple and Microsoft responded by suing for trampling on their intellectual property rights.
But wait, there's more! It doesn't end at Apple and Microsoft! Google also ripped off Sun by co-opting, without license, the Java dev environment (that cost Sun millions of dev dollars) and more importantly, the Java work force (that cost Sun billions of marketing dollars), just so they could get more people to make apps for their mobile OS. Guess what! Sun/Oracle sued them too!
Wow, if all these companies are suing Google for ripping them off (and considering multiple patent-related injunctions issued against Android vendors), it must mean Google has been ripping them off!
See? I can spin facts to support arbitrary biases as well.
Now, let's drop the incendiary language that most posters here stoop to. Here's the (overly simplified) reality: Google took for free what they thought they could get legally away with (and their gambles have so far paid off), and their competitors responded by trying to restrict them by using other legal counter-measures. Each side is doing exactly what they can get away with legally. People just happen to side with Google because their actions agree with their personal biases.
I don't know how you can expect to keep a neutral tone when equating this to war. That is striking an incendiary tone from the beginning.
Releasing Android was not an "attack". It was entering a market with a competitive product. The fact that Google was able to leverage new methods and resources (open source and the continued evolving of the Linux kernel) to reduce the cost of their offering (to the point of changing where revenue is generated in the product) is a normal market behavior. Pooling monopolistic grants and abusing the legal system to thwart market behavior is not something I think we should condone, regardless of how much the other companies felt under attack.
The comparison to war was simply a rhetoric device to imply that all is fair in love and war.
> Releasing Android was not an "attack". It was entering a market with a competitive product. The fact that Google was able to leverage new methods and resources (open source and the continued evolving of the Linux kernel) to reduce the cost of their offering (to the point of changing where revenue is generated in the product) is a normal market behavior.
That's one perspective. See my response to the sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6657912) to see another perspective. Google was not the first to think of using Linux for a mobile OS (See: Maemo). But think of where the real competitive advantage for Android came from: Now can you now think why Apple is unhappy?
>* Pooling monopolistic grants and abusing the legal system to thwart market behavior is not something I think we should condone, regardless of how much the other companies felt under attack.*
"Monopolistic grants" is just a biased way to look at the patent system that most of the other tech industry works with just fine. "Abusing the legal system"? Again, let's just keep in mind it was not Apple or Microsoft, but Google which was found by a federal jury to be doing so, and charged millions of dollars for that.
Google did whatever they thought they could get away with legally to get an advantage. These companies are simply doing the same.
I happened to see your other comment when it was just a few minutes old. I almost replied to it directly, but it would only have been to say "huh?" I found it hard to distinguish when you were purposefully being extreme and when you were making actual assertions of your own views (if any). A fine exhibit of Poe's law, I guess, as even though you indicate sarcasm, I'm not sure where it starts...
I wasn't terming them "monopolistic grants" to vilify them (those words are used in the law itself), merely to more clearly express the specific aspects they are pooling that I object to. Specifically, with in more detail, it's the pooling of the patents into a third party to make use of the patents while protecting the parent companies from much of the downsides of using their patents against believed infringers. I term that abusing the legal system. It may not be illegal yet, but that doesn't stop me from deeming it a morally repugnant perversion of how the patent system is supposed to operate.
Google may indeed be guilty of patent infringement based on their actions, but from where I'm standing, it's nowhere near clear. I would prefer less legal maneuvering and more clear cases regarding patents and suspected patent infringement, but unfortunately it's not in patent holder's interests to test whether patents are actually valid, as they are much more useful as a tool to intimidate.
Ugh, just realized... this was supposed to be a reply to pg's top-rated comment but I ended up posting it as a separate thread. As such, the second half appears completely out of context.
Locking people into their mobile ecosystem is probably worth way more then that in the long term. That's what these companies are all about, after all.
What I don't understand is why in the world are companies allowed to buy patents in the first place? At the very least, patents should NOT be transferable.
How is it acceptable for companies with big pockets to simply buy 6,000 patents and then sue the shit out of whomever they don't like?
I mean, to some degree, I accept that patents in the health-care industry are helping, because research labs spend years and enormous amount of money on research, with results that can be easily copied. And so they need the first mover advantage in bringing the product they researched on the market. It's not perfect, but at least it has some economical and moral ground.
But how in the world is it acceptable for patents to be transferred, like they are assets? If you weren't the one doing the research, then you shouldn't be the one that benefits from a government-granted monopoly, no matter how much money you have.
Know nothing about this. But say they couldn't be transferred. Then you could have moribund companies holding a patent and doing nothing with it thus stopping other people from doing something that would benefit the world. But given that they can be transferred, there is a market, so a moribund company has an incentive to pass the patent on, and the patented thing gets realized, by someone.
I'm happy for patent war to go nuclear. It desperately needs reform and neutering; and if lawsuits like these can motivate some big-tech companies like, say, Google to start lobbying seriously for patent reform then this exactly what the world needs.
And by lobbying seriously I don't mean a couple of million that were spent on some other activities - if such companies are eager to spend amount such as 4 billion or 12 billion on purchases that include zero benefit to their products&customers, but simply as patent war ammunition&defense; then I'd expect that they can easily spend hundreds of millions in campaign contributions to extuinguish the patent war as such.
We don't need bigcorps accumulating frivolous patents to ensure mutually assured destruction - it doesn't work that well as a deterrant, and it is used against smaller corporations. We need disarmament.
It would be naïve to think they wouldn't do this. Google would do it if they were in the same position. This is mostly a problem with the law, the fact that such a thing is possible is a problem.
Also, pretty much all these companies were invited to join Rockstar to buy the patents, including Google: http://www.techradar.com/... . Except Google decided that they wanted it all for themselves and went against the group, in the end they lost. The only reason to hold these patents are to basically sue other companies, the fact that Google bid against the group over and over again implies that if Google had gotten these patents they would have done exactly the same. So lets not pretend Google is a victim.
> a "navigation tool for graphical user interface," describes a way of navigating through electronic documents. Another describes an "Internet protocol filter," and a third patent describes an "integrated message center."
There is something mildly sickening and darkly amusing that Microsoft and Apple apparently learned enough losing over half a billion dollars in patent lawsuits filed by McKool Smith, to then hire them when they were ready to go after their competitors with patent suits.
I would think that 4.4 billion could effectively fund congressional campaigns in a number of key districts.. which may be more effective use of said funds for Google at this point. If I were Google, I'd be funding an all out war on technology patents.
Easy people, don't waste your emotional energy. Microsoft has been collecting Android licensing fee for years now. Apple has the objective to kill Androids. And you think Google don't use patent to sue? These companies are all evils.
I believe Google has only used patents defensively. At least that's what I've heard their official position is, and I haven't heard anyone call them out for violating it.
If the Obama DOJ has any guts, they'll break out the collusion section of anti-trust law and make some new anti-trust case law regarding multi-company patent offensives and the potential to cause harm to consumers.
It is simple Microsoft and Apple are trying to get their paid 4.5Billion dollars from Google. It is a strategic mistake from Google side deciding not to be part of that team to buy the patents from Nortel.
As someone wrote a century ago - "Monopoly, it inevitably engenders a tendency of stagnation and decay...the motive cause of technical and, consequently, of all other progress disappears to a certain extent and, further, the economic possibility arises of deliberately retarding technical progress. For instance, in America, a certain Owens invented a machine which revolutionised the manufacture of bottles. The German bottle-manufacturing cartel purchased Owens's patent, but pigeon-holed it, refrained from utilising it."
At least the US and USSR realized what Mutually Assured Destruction actually meant. It seems these big companies don't quite understand, and it's going to be pretty sad when they find out.
$56 billion in cash. They're anything but helpless.
A $6 billion bid for RIM would solve the problem.
They also have Motorola's massive patent hoard, with thousands of patents available to assault both Microsoft and Apple. So far Google has mostly played nice on patents.
I'm going to hold judgement until I understand the size of licensing fees being requested (and if there is a separate FRAND rate for any Standards Essential Patents).
Google bid $4.4Bn for this portfolio so they must have see value and/or danger in these patents. I disagree with the article's statement that "Google has plenty of patents" as this doesn't seem to the case in the current battles with Apple and Microsoft. The Motorola purchase doesn't seem to have helped much in this area either.
It will be interesting to see how this goes now that it is (essentially) an all-American battle. The Samsung / Apple suit was always complicated by suspicions about the jury, partly (but not only) because it seemed impossible for a US jury to take an unbiased view of a trial between such an emblematic American company and a foreign corporation. This one will be a much different contest and perhaps we have a better chance of seeing a real examination of the underlying patent issues occur.
The problem is not if Google or Apple, Microsoft & Co. are good or evil. This patent war is evil, very evil. Because it could prevent companies like Jolla, Canonical or Mozilla to release their smart phone OS world wide.
Especially small companies won't have a chance in a patent battle against a Apple, Microsoft or Google proxy.
That is the biggest problem, and the solution has to be political, it won't be reached in the courts or on the market but in parliament.
This is the disaster started by Google themselves. Also a reward for betraying friendly partner - especially who is not likely can take Google's business, and even attacking them using new partner.
Now Google's mates are only Samsung and telecoms which seems really not helpful on these kind of lawsuit or Google's image.
See now what's happening. Apple-Microsoft alliance against Google, Samsung and telecoms…? Am I alone feeling former team looks nicer?
At my last job, 15 years ago, I was granted four patents. I also got a fancy engraved plaque for each one. I've since moved, and those plaques sit in unpacked boxes. My wife has occasionally pressed me to hang then up like I used to, when we both saw them as a point of pride. I have trouble explaining to her why they're an embarrassment to me now, and that I'm not showing them off.
If you're aware of anyone being strong-armed with your patents you could make amends with your conscience by offering to consult with them to help them workaround or invalidate them.
Just as a side note: Because English is not my mother tongue I have problems to understand what the title actually wants to say, though. To me it sounds like Apple owns Microsoft, and Microsoft is Apple's "rockstar" because it sues Google. So I wonder if some mother tongue speakers could verify that the title is actually understandable to them and explain what the title wants to say. Thanks!
I wonder how hard Canonical will get hit eventually if Ubunut Phone ever comes close to being viable.
But most importantly: lol software patents.
The twisted part in me hopes every single startup will get sued for all the amazing one-click patents and whatnot that they infringe upon as soon as they secure their first round of financing at some point. Maybe then something will change but I doubt it.
I am shocked that Google's "ads in search" business was patented before Google was founded, and no one ever asserted this patent. Bill Gross' overture said they never patented it.
Imagine for a second that Google will have to turn over a portion of the ads revenue from the past 10 years? It makes up 97% of their revenue...
Android has really been a source of innovation over the past few years. I would hate to see things take a step back. I recall a couple years ago, when Google had to remove the integrated search feature from Android -- that searched both local and online -- due to some IP infringement.
It looks to me that it is really a wrong system when you can buy patents only to sue someone in the future. And it rarely benefits people who create stuff
If you could buy patents only to use them (but the ownership of a patent would not be transferable) there would be no patent trolls
I think the ultimate outcome of this type of patent war is either:
a) Re-examining the whole patent system to prevent this sort of attack
b) Companies will have to re-locate to China or another country where US patents do not apply
It's totally ridiculous to be sued for offering free software.
Maybe the problem with patents is that they are transferrable property. What if patents were seen more as a license from the government to an inventor for a period of exclusivity? That would prevent the worst of this sort of stockpiling and weaponization.
I really wish they'd just nullify any patent granted that involves "doing something commonplace ON THE INTERNET!!!", as if adding a tcp/ip connection is something truly inventive or novel. Christ, this is getting out of hand.
We are all building software on the shoulders of giants but like to claim major pieces of glory once we grow into corporations. Remove a certain piece and like jenga it all falls down.
Some pieces protected by patents. Others patentable but never claimed.
It this not business as usual? Not saying it is "right," but not saying that it is out of the norm. It seems to be an issue now that people(consumers, nerds, etc.) have emotional connections to these companies
??? They spent 4.5 billion on patents rather than invest in their own products. For all they know the patent system can completely change in the next 5 years, outlawing the kind of crap they're pulling right now.
I don't know why Google doesn't just license these patents, it's pretty critical to their business. They obviously thought so when they were bidding billions of dollars for them.
Just keep overpaying for "pretty" hardware and a mediocre development environment and see where it gets us folks. Apple is just as bad as M$ ever was, they just have more style.
I think software patents sucks! Software patents is a way for big corporations to keep smaller agile competitors off their turf creating monopolies & oligopolies.
The real villains aren't the companies involved in battles of fisticuffs, they are the corrupt or incompetent politicians who fail to abolish software patents.
minor point: evasion is not legal, avoidance is legal. So, Google does tax avoidance, not tax evasion.
And Google has lawyers and accountants telling them that what they're doing is legal, but if the UK tax authorities disagree it goes to a court. So it's possible that what Google is doing isn't legal, because it hasn't been tested in court.
For me this feels like it's the famed "Thermonuclear option" Steve Jobs alluded to: two of the biggest tech giants and their ilk conspiring to KO a competitor in one of the most cowardly ways possible.
As one shouldn't make the assumption that Rockstar is looking to compete, Rockstar is looking to defeat. This all feels like instead of studying harder you pay off the schoolyard bully to go beat up that kid you don't like because he gets better grades than you do.
Rockstar is not just a patent troll, it's the Patent Troll King. It's much larger, and has vastly more financial backing, most notably from Apple and Microsoft. It's nearly invincible (as it can't be counter-sued). Plus the case is filed in Eastern Texas, known to side with patent holders.
Both companies have much cash in their coffers, and both are feeling the heat from Android. For Apple, the high-end Android devices eat into their margins. While Apple still is very profitable, Android's break-neck pace forces them to come up with their own new features or risk looking dated, coupled with Android's often better-specced phones that are cheaper than the iPhone. Although brand loyalty is shielding Apple from large shifts, it can't afford to sit still. Microsoft on the other hand, is playing catch-up in Mobile after missing the boat miserably, and while the focus should be on making their own products better, they largely seem to have been industrious in harassing Android hardware manufacturers, plus employing some questionable PR-tactics to smear its competition. They'd both be relieved to see Android wither and die.
The tactic at the heart of the battle against Android seems to be the following: increasing Android Total Cost of Ownership by drowning it in patent licenses. This in an attempt to make it toxic to any OEM or potential Android partner (as they have to pay license fees, or could be sued to oblivion if they refuse), all in a bid to make Android less attractive (vis-a-vis e.g. Windows). I don't know the might of Android/Google, nor how much strength it'll need to face off against the now teamed arsenals of both Apple and Microsoft. If Rockstar can string Android up with enough patent licenses, OEMs will bail, developers will leave and Android revenues will dry up. It'll make a Windows license look cheap and safe in comparision. Then Microsoft can return to pointing and laughing at the open-source community, sit back and let their software rot once more as they just eliminated their direct competition. They'll have some air fist-fights with Apple to seemingly 'compete'.
What more is Rockstar than a hired gun they can sic on any software outfit that might prove competitive? What if Microsoft feels that Valve's SteamBox is getting a little too much traction for their comfort, why wouldn't they just send their bully after them? What if Ubuntu can cling on to some larger marketshare when it can smoothly switch between phone and desktop software? Why shouldn't Microsoft try and hobble innovative efforts by letting Rockstar make the developers' lives a living hell? It's more than sickening that some Microsoft/Apple fans are already reacting all indignant and holier-than-thou now that their patent lackey has a Nortel patent on search, as if Google stole web-search from them all along, and they only just noticed it.
What can counter Rockstar? At what point is this hulking giant too big for the market it's trying to disrupt? What stops this beast from going after any open source project that proves slightly popular? How can a developer rest easy at night, knowing that any day a Rockstar lawyer might be knocking on his/her door, and that financial ruin lies ahead? Whether by lawyer fees after a Pyrrhic victory or after being shut down because he/she was found to infringe on something so very basic a child of five years old could have figured it out? John Vesci himself said that 'Pretty much anybody out there is infringing', meaning that any company name that gets in their sights, they can take apart.
Is that furthering the sciences? Is that what passes for innovation nowadays? As a developer, this makes me sick to my stomach. But the system allows it, and there's been too much financial profitability to get this genie back in the bottle, so the odds of reform happening before this warhead hits are slim. Even if it were to happen, it'll be thoroughly undressed and defanged before being applied to any case worth its salt.
I'm busy reading "The Masters of Doom". Here is a little snippet all about patents with one of the world's best developers of all time, John Carmack.
"Carmack turned red. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he snapped, “I’ll quit.” Al assumed Carmack was trying to protect his own financial interests, but in reality he had struck what was an increasingly raw nerve for the young, idealistic programmer. It was one of the few things that could truly make him angry. It was ingrained in his bones since his first reading of the Hacker Ethic."
As a developer there is nothing more destructive than to be be told you can't do that... it is similar to what I did.
Could you imagine what would happen if someone put a patient on breathing?
So, you're saying that a company deserves to be sued if it makes a product that was previously unaffordable for the masses, affordable? That's totally being an elitist (and in a way discriminatory). Not that I'm outraged with your comment, I just think that everyone having access to technology is only a good thing and it is actual progress by itself.
Apple used to be careful not to alienate hackers. And Microsoft has been gradually digging itself out of a hole in that respect for several years. Now in my mind they are both the enemy.