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Apple, Google to pay $324 million to settle conspiracy lawsuit

reuters.com

31–40 of 109 posts

Re: Apple, Google to pay $324 million to settle conspiracy lawsuit

#31
post #23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, why did you choose to call out Apple particularly?

They are the antithesis of what I believe a technology company should be. Everything is closed source, locked down and designed to make maximum profit at the expense of the customer/developer/artist.

A company is likely not the appropriate structure if you want to create free software.

Re: Apple, Google to pay $324 million to settle conspiracy lawsuit

#33
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are the antithesis of what I believe a technology company should be. Everything is closed source, locked down and designed to make maximum profit at the expense of the customer/developer/artist.

A company is likely not the appropriate structure if you want to create free software.

> A publicly-traded company is likely not the appropriate structure if you want to create free software.

Fixed. Non-public companies can sometimes be an appropriate structure. E.g. the Mozilla Corporation: as a for-profit entity it can do a lot of things that the non-profit Mozilla Foundation can't, but it's 100% owned and completely controlled by the Foundation, and reinvests all profits back into the Mozilla project.

Re: Apple, Google to pay $324 million to settle conspiracy lawsuit

#35
post #5

Settlement seems low. Looks like every company involved ended up saving quite a bit of money, after all is said and done, with this little salary racket they had going.

Dear Sergey, Larry, Tim Cook & Co, don't do this again or you'll pay tens of millions after saving hundreds of millions in salaries and benefit.

It's like you missed the memo that notified everyone that huge corporations that directly or indirectly fund all of the government decision-makers have carte blanche in America!

Re: Apple, Google to pay $324 million to settle conspiracy lawsuit

#36
post #5

Settlement seems low. Looks like every company involved ended up saving quite a bit of money, after all is said and done, with this little salary racket they had going.

Yeah, pretty terrible outcome. Lawyers get a huge chunk of money for relatively little effort, the actual plaintiffs get like a couple of thousand each, and the companies pay out an amount that is likely far less than the amount they saved by the illegal collusion and is also not sufficiently punitive to impact their future decisions to do similar things.

Re: Apple, Google to pay $324 million to settle conspiracy lawsuit

#37
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are the antithesis of what I believe a technology company should be. Everything is closed source, locked down and designed to make maximum profit at the expense of the customer/developer/artist.

A company is likely not the appropriate structure if you want to create free software.

I think the opposite argument can be made -- Red Hat makes this business model work, and they're doing pretty well.

Also, if in the future open source becomes the norm, not the exception, then this will become moot -- the fact that a company is based on open-source will be considered typical, not an outlier.

Re: Apple, Google to pay $324 million to settle conspiracy lawsuit

#38
post #2

Now the question is, how much do people receive after the lawyers take their cut and it's divided up among 64K employees?

Typically lawyers get on the order of 30%, so about $3400 per employee.

And then that $3400 gets taxed as normal income so they are probably walking away with something close to $2k each.

Re: Apple, Google to pay $324 million to settle conspiracy lawsuit

#39
post #9
post #7

This will leave a bad taste in the mouth around these companies. Apple really sound like a disgusting corporation when you look behind their well orchestrated PR image.

So does Google.

Being a Google engineer is pretty nice.

Re: Apple, Google to pay $324 million to settle conspiracy lawsuit

#40
post #5

Settlement seems low. Looks like every company involved ended up saving quite a bit of money, after all is said and done, with this little salary racket they had going.

Dear Sergey, Larry, Tim Cook & Co, don't do this again or you'll pay tens of millions after saving hundreds of millions in salaries and benefit.

I'm pretty sure Google/Apple will find itself in a ditch it can't escape from (e.g. Microsoft ten years ago and now). Things like this makes new engineers think twice before working for them, additionally their size has already shown as a detriment to them.
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