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."
Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google
161–170 of 554 posts
Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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).
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.
>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.
Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [...] largest and most dominant companies on the planet. ... in software.
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. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_by_market_...
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.
Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
comparing Linux to Android is ridiculous. Linus released and built it from genuine, ulterior motives. google wanted a platform to display ads.
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.
Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google
#165 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.
Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google
#166'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.
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.
[EDIT] Just went through https://www.google.com/patents/US6037937 quickly ... it has not changed my opinion.
Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>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.
Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
yes, Google/Motorola suing Microsoft/Apple for standards essentials patent was to foster innovation..LOL
Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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).
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.
Here's a poll. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6652189
Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google
#170It'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…
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.
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.