11–20 of 90 posts
Earn (verb): 'gain or incur deservedly in return for one's behavior or achievements.' So why change the article's title, HN?
If these numbers are accurate, then yuck!!! My disgust for software patents just went up even further. More seriously, I have a question for those who know more about this... 1. Are these generic, broad "idea" patents and hence there is nothing Google/OEMs can really do here to avoid licensing them? If not, why don't they use an alternative implementation to avoid the conflict? 2. If the answer to #1 is yes, how does…
no alternative implementation would help as it is not about some specific patents, it is more about [litigation] threat that some patents in the vast portfolio can be found that may be in some sense considered violated. Basically it is racket called Android Licensing Program - you pay "protection money" to MS in exchange for it not bothering you.
What interesting here is that Google seems to leave its OEMs to fend for themselves, thus instead of fighting one Google over 2B/yearly pot (the show that first row tickets for would sell like for Superball), MS extorts fifty million here and hundred million there which is much easier and safer.
If these numbers are accurate, then yuck!!! My disgust for software patents just went up even further. More seriously, I have a question for those who know more about this... 1. Are these generic, broad "idea" patents and hence there is nothing Google/OEMs can really do here to avoid licensing them? If not, why don't they use an alternative implementation to avoid the conflict? 2. If the answer to #1 is yes, how does…
>1. Are these generic, broad "idea" patents and hence there is nothing Google/OEMs can really do here to avoid licensing them? If not, why don't they use an alternative implementation to avoid the conflict? no alternative implementation would help as it is not about some specific patents, it is more about [litigation] threat that some patents in the vast portfolio can be found that may be in some sense considered vio…
I buy the other argument more, the one that says Android does horribly infringe on Apple's and Microsoft's patents because it's a copied product and that's what happens when you make a copied product.
How can a company so shamelessly extract money (through forceful deals, no doubt) from an open source OS, and get away with it? Linux companies dodged this bullet for the most part, from both Microsoft and SCU, but it seems Microsoft "succeeded" this time against Android with their mostly garbage patents in the same way patent trolls and mass-bittorrent lawsuits have succeeded so far - by scaring people/companies int…
It's worth noting that many of the patents asserted in the B&N case had nothing to do with mobile and were equally applicable to any form of Linux. The only reason MS did not assert them to quell Linux adoption is a) they did not need to and b) it would have been seen as anti-competitive. As such we've been kind of lulled into a false sense of security about the huge stockpile of stupid patents these early operating systems companies have built up. It's more or less like nuclear waste - lying around waiting for someone to build dirty bombs with it. And of course, since there is a clock ticking on the expiry of the patents, MS and others will start becoming increasingly keen to deploy them if only to extract value before the expiry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think Microsoft has ever made a profit on Xbox, although I'm sure they've split up and distributed its losses to all sorts of divisions to hide that. They're about to do the same with Bing, too, now.
So why do they make the xbox? Why are they making another one?