Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 554 posts

Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

#531

Post by kazagistar »

anoncowherd wrote: post #507
stock_toaster wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 go…

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.

Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

#532

Post by kazagistar »

bowlofpetunias wrote: post #224
pg wrote: post #61

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…

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 b…

From the perspective of "trivial software patents are bullshit", violating software patents does not in any way make you a "bad guy".

Furthermore, google is actively lobbying to weaken software patents.

I would say, then, that in this case, they are certainly my ally, or at the very least, the enemy of my enemy.

Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

#533

Post by nullc »

scholia wrote: post #385
aroch wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google has not done this, Microsoft and Apple have. Google's Motorola Mobility has sued others based on patents in their portfolio.

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.

Because this litigation began before the acquisition of Motorola Mobility?

Or because the patents in question were H.264 ones, which the defendant themselves already collects royalties on?

Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

#534

Post by pasbesoin »

I have, perhaps, some degree of sympathy for compensating people whose significant work is subsequently, directly used.

I'm about done with, "You can't do it because I did it first."

The world wants to move forward. Your outsized self-interest, simply doesn't interest me.

Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

#535

Post by eonil »

cheald wrote: post #156
ekianjo wrote: post #28

Earlier 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.

With the exception of OS X developer. With the exception of Windows developer.

Even only for web-stuffs, I still prefer OS X absolutely. What you said is just an early generalization.

Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

#536

Post by eonil »

m_mueller wrote: post #194
cheald wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 r…

Totally agree. Whoever testing product on dev machine is all idiots.

Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

#537

Post by eonil »

throwaway98604 wrote: post #34
ekianjo wrote: post #28

Earlier 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).

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.

Go and do it right now. Experience them yourself. And experience Android yourself. Don't have a Android device? Don't worry, there's an emulator.

And let's see whether you can say after that.

Personally, I lost all the technical/engineering respect on Google people after that.

Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

#538

Post by eonil »

throwaway98604 wrote: post #121
jemeshsu wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Significant consumer-facing iOS 7 Changes: 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 c…

Do you really sure that your users want them?

It can win just for your hobby or taste, but not for end users. And end-users define the business. Not your taste.

Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

#539

Post by eonil »

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?

Re: Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

#540

Post by belorn »

DannyBee wrote: post #499
belorn wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

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.

Post reply on HN