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I addressed this very point in my post. Read it again. Better yet, clean your glasses and read this :

Google might have wanted to provide a free license to these patents with to any users of Android, something that might not have been allowed with the other members of the patent pool, which could have then led to them being forced into a lawsuit against their OEMs.

Now, please, we weren't privy to the details of the offer to join the consortium in great lenghts, so to call names at Google for not joining is quite shallow. It's a sign of people just searching for reasons to hate on a corporation.



Wait, which followers are you referring to ? I've seen no Google followers here.

It matters little what Google's intent for use of the Nortel patents; that option is lost forever.

Google is now arguing in the court of public opinion that these same competitors that did obtain the Nortel patents by winning the bid will continue to harass Android OEM's with "bogus" patent infringement in an attempt to limit Android competition through the burden of IP licensing fees.

I don't know and don't much care what the outcome is; it's just multinational corporations in competition.

I do find it interesting that there is serious support for multinationals, in this case at least some of the OEM's, to somehow get a free ride on the coattails of the same R&D that competitors have engaged in and the subsequent IP created, that most would consider to be a fair and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

The question then ultimately becomes whether Android OEM's can absorb the cost of any future IP licensing burden and still maintain a presence as low cost producers in the market.

I suspect not.
 
There is the unix timeline if anyone wants:
http://www.netneurotic.de/mac/unix/images/UNIX.png

Thanks. Shows my point quite nicely. Anyway, Caldera (then known as SCO) tried the "Linux uses Unix code" angle, we all know where that got them. It's funny anyone in 2011 would claim such a thing after the 3 years of discovery in SCO v. IBM where SCO never was able to produce a single item of infringing code in Linux even though they were asked several times by the judge to do so with specificity.

I think errno.h is the closest they came, but then it was proved Linux's errno.h was not from BSD, but just a bunch of definitions from the POSIX standard. And headers were then declared to not be copyrightable thanks to case precedent and good old fashion good sense.
 
Well Google could of joined the other team,,, but they didn't. Wonder why? Couldn't have been because they wanted all those patents to themselves could it? No, Google would never ever do such a thing. Give me a break. The hypocrisy is getting to be pretty large for Google. Man I could only imagine the haters against apple who would come out of the wood works if this story was about Apple claiming "Hostile...". :rolleyes:

Sorry Google, you lost fair and square.
 
Well Google could of joined the other team,,, but they didn't. Wonder why? Couldn't have been because they wanted all those patents to themselves could it? No, Google would never ever do such a thing. Give me a break.

Give you a break what ? Again : There's plenty of reasons Google could have wanted those patents for themselves and plenty of reasons why joining a consortium could have done more harm than good for them.

Let's always just assume the worse I guess ? :rolleyes:
 
Well Google could of joined the other team,,, but they didn't. Wonder why? Couldn't have been because they wanted all those patents to themselves could it? No, Google would never ever do such a thing. Give me a break. The hypocrisy is getting to be pretty large for Google. Man I could only imagine the haters against apple who would come out of the wood works if this story was about Apple claiming "Hostile...". :rolleyes:

Sorry Google, you lost fair and square.

Agreed, if this was apple whining we'd here everyone talking about how jobs deserves this and how he needs to stop whining. Poor google, everyones picking on them....riiite...

Give you a break what ? Again : There's plenty of reasons Google could have wanted those patents for themselves and plenty of reasons why joining a consortium could have done more harm than good for them.

Let's always just assume the worse I guess ? :rolleyes:

Or we could just assume the ridiculous right? Corporate conspiracy theories...:rolleyes:
 
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I think errno.h is the closest they came, but then it was proved Linux's errno.h was not from BSD, but just a bunch of definitions from the POSIX standard. And headers were then declared to not be copyrightable thanks to case precedent and good old fashion good sense.

There's no blanket disallowance of copyright protections on header files.
 
There's no blanket disallowance of copyright protections on header files.

I think it was as long as they only provide definitions to adhere to a written specification and don't contain any executable code per say. Anyway, in SCO v IBM, errno.h was such a non-copyrightable file.
 
Nope, Unix System I and Unix System II were both written in DEC PDP-8 assembly. None of it was written in C 'til Unix System III and that was a mix of C and PDP-8 assembly.

Yes, this is all true. But what I said is also true: Unix was written in C practically since the start (mind the word practically here). 1970-1972 it was not written in C. 1972 to present day it was. And mind you it started as a research project. I'm not sure what your point is about being a mix of PDP-8 assembly and C is since any operating system must contain at least some assembly for things like managing interrupts, context switching, i/o, etc. But this whole talk about C is sort of irrelevant to the argument, and neither of us is wrong here, so let's both drop it.

What you have not shown is that Linux is related to Unix in a way that makes it less "modern" than Mac OS X, or that it's less modern by some other measure. That's the crux of the matter.
 
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Google is just being a big baby. This is the real world, you have to fight to survive, especially in this economy. Even to post a blog post about this. kind of makes them look like a baby crying out to mommy for help. They should of helped this better. Not calling it a war or what ever they called it. Google just needs to stick with the internet. No more software. I remember when Google and Apple where BFF's and were teaming up against Microsoft. Now it's backwards. Google is like a loud fart but not deadly. You hear it (google search engine) You get scared of the smell (All of the things they did in a short amount of time, Web browser, Phones, ect.) Then 5 minutes have pass and you don't smell anything. (Google dies) Then your just laughing cause nothing happened. Apple on the other hand is silent but deadly. You don't see it coming cause you can't hear it. Then you smell it and you start flipping out and then it last longer and you remember it.

Did that make any sense what so ever?
 
Yes, this is all true. But what I said is also true: Unix was written in C practically since the start (mind the word practically here). 1970-1972 it was not written in C. 1972 to present day it was. And mind you it started as a research project. I'm not sure what your point is about being a mix of PDP-8 assembly and C is since any operating system must contain at least some assembly for things like managing interrupts, context switching, i/o, etc. But this whole talk about C is sort of irrelevant to the argument, and neither of us is wrong here, so let's both drop it.

Unix System I was a critical task, production OS from the start. It sounds like you got the white-washed BSD Unix, Mr. Rodgers version of the history of Unix. Here is the full story Seymour.

Back in the 60's, IBM was on the rise with their mainframes in every major business in the USA and western Europe. IBM wanted their customers data on their machines so they could keep on selling hardware and service contracts. Their diametric methodological opponent was AT&T.

AT&T did not want any IBM equipment in the Bell System but still wanted to automate their switching. Over a period of two years, AT&T bough one DEC PDP-8 for every Bell System Central Office in the USA. That one deal, made DEC.

After a while, Bell Lab researchers starting messing with other things other than switching on a DEC PDP-8 running Unix System I. One of these was storing customer's digital data in the Bell System. This way customers could use only the storage space they needed and bill them for shared space on digital storage systems that resided in Ma Bell Central Offices. Yes, Ma Bell had Cloud Computing (in kilobytes only but still) fifty years ago!

Watson and company over at IBM saw the shared remote storage, PDP-8 prototypes running Unix Systems I in the experimental Central Offices at Bell Labs in New Jersey and hit the roof seeing it as a direct threat to selling big iron. From that, they petitioned the Fed to regulate AT&T out of the computing business saying that remotely stored data was a "security risk." With the Red Scare still and the assassination of JFK still reeling the country, the Fed regulated AT&T out of any computing business.

Unix became a cloistered prodigy child just running switching for the next twenty years 'til the AT&T break up in 1984. The break up allowed AT&T to get back into the computing game that IBM kibitzed them out of two decades ago. One was licensing the now, C language based, Unix V to Berkley as a "research base" that was the genesis for Sun Microsystems, SGI, SCO Unix and a bunch of other Unix variants over the next ten years.

You just read from Chapter Four onward in the history of Unix not knowing the real start in the hey day of Teletype and paper-tape. ;)
 
Unix System I was a critical task, production OS from the start. It sounds like you got the white-washed BSD Unix, Mr. Rodgers version of the history of Unix. Here is the full story Seymour.

Back in the 60's, IBM was on the rise with their mainframes in every major business in the USA and western Europe. IBM wanted their customers data on their machines so they could keep on selling hardware and service contracts. Their diametric methodological opponent was AT&T.

AT&T did not want any IBM equipment in the Bell System but still wanted to automate their switching. Over a period of two years, AT&T bough one DEC PDP-8 for every Bell System Central Office in the USA. That one deal, made DEC.

After a while, Bell Lab researchers starting messing with other things other than switching on a DEC PDP-8 running Unix System I. One of these was storing customer's digital data in the Bell System. This way customers could use only the storage space they needed and bill them for shared space on digital storage systems that resided in Ma Bell Central Offices. Yes, Ma Bell had Cloud Computing (in kilobytes only but still) fifty years ago!

Watson and company over at IBM saw the shared remote storage, PDP-8 prototypes running Unix Systems I in the experimental Central Offices at Bell Labs in New Jersey and hit the roof seeing it as a direct threat to selling big iron. From that, they petitioned the Fed to regulate AT&T out of the computing business saying that remotely stored data was a "security risk." With the Red Scare still and the assassination of JFK still reeling the country, the Fed regulated AT&T out of any computing business.

Unix became a cloistered prodigy child just running switching for the next twenty years 'til the AT&T break up in 1984. The break up allowed AT&T to get back into the computing game that IBM kibitzed them out of two decades ago. One was licensing the now, C language based, Unix V to Berkley as a "research base" that was the genesis for Sun Microsystems, SGI, SCO Unix and a bunch of other Unix variants over the next ten years.

You just read from Chapter Four onward in the history of Unix not knowing the real start in the hey day of Teletype and paper-tape. ;)

Ok, thank you for going through the effort of writing that, but it doesn't address at all your criticism of Linux.
 
Let's always just assume the worse I guess ? :rolleyes:
Worse than the facts of this story?

  1. Google says no to joining the bidding consortium.
  2. Google bids on its own. Loses.
  3. Google claims others are "organized...against Android".

Really, what could be worse? ****, I even left out the inflammatory words in the quote, and it still sounds like a whiny 4 year old that got the wrong toy.
 
Worse than the facts of this story?

  1. Google says no to joining the bidding consortium.
  2. Google bids on its own. Loses.
  3. Google claims others are "organized...against Android".

Really, what could be worse? ****, I even left out the inflammatory words in the quote, and it still sounds like a whiny 4 year old that got the wrong toy.

+ 1...we can try to spin it forty ways but it's just whining...and the sad thing is some people are eating it all up
 
Worse than the facts of this story?

  1. Google says no to joining the bidding consortium.
  2. Google bids on its own. Loses.
  3. Google claims others are "organized...against Android".

Really, what could be worse?
  1. Google joins bidding consortium
  2. Consortium wins bid
  3. Consortium sues Android OEMs, forcing Google into a lawsuit against its partners.

That is one scenario where this is worse. Again, we don't know what Google's intentions were for the patents. For all we know, their intentions (maybe a free-license to the patents for Android OEMs) was completely incompatible with the consortium's wish.

Again I ask, why assume the worse ? Obviously, there's a reason Google didn't join the consortium. You want to assume greed, fine. I'd rather keep a level head and assume their reasons were purely intentional incompatibilities. Google wanted to do X, the Consortium Y. Thus Google decided not to join and try to go at it alone.

If you guys want to plainly just "take sides" and hate on Google, seriously, you need to realise all these corporations don't care about your support in this. Google didn't even voice their opinion here, this is 1 employee saying something on his blog, you're taking this as Google's official position and running with it. I don't see any press release here or official statement. Yet, again, Macrumors is all hate, hate, hate, hate. Just because there's Google in the story headline.
 
patents vs copyrights

Let's assume for a minute that you're a professional artist. You create a very nice painting. I take a picture of it and start selling postcards with your painting on the back.

Would you show me some "consideration" and not sue me?

I think in this case you're mixing patents and copyrights.

I agree with the previous posters who said patents need to be rethought when it comes to technology.
 
I'm not comfortable with these huge companies like MS and Apple teaming up and buying up all the patents. I want to see more competition and more choices and let the consumers decide what they want on their computers.
 
Interesting. I knew part of this. Also a PDP-8 was the first computer I ever saw, touched and had to learn "octal" (base 16 numbers) to use. We had one in the Brown Univ. Psychology lab in 1967.

Unix System I was a critical task, production OS from the start. It sounds like you got the white-washed BSD Unix, Mr. Rodgers version of the history of Unix. Here is the full story Seymour.

Back in the 60's, IBM was on the rise with their mainframes in every major business in the USA and western Europe. IBM wanted their customers data on their machines so they could keep on selling hardware and service contracts. Their diametric methodological opponent was AT&T.

AT&T did not want any IBM equipment in the Bell System but still wanted to automate their switching. Over a period of two years, AT&T bough one DEC PDP-8 for every Bell System Central Office in the USA. That one deal, made DEC.

After a while, Bell Lab researchers starting messing with other things other than switching on a DEC PDP-8 running Unix System I. One of these was storing customer's digital data in the Bell System. This way customers could use only the storage space they needed and bill them for shared space on digital storage systems that resided in Ma Bell Central Offices. Yes, Ma Bell had Cloud Computing (in kilobytes only but still) fifty years ago!

Watson and company over at IBM saw the shared remote storage, PDP-8 prototypes running Unix Systems I in the experimental Central Offices at Bell Labs in New Jersey and hit the roof seeing it as a direct threat to selling big iron. From that, they petitioned the Fed to regulate AT&T out of the computing business saying that remotely stored data was a "security risk." With the Red Scare still and the assassination of JFK still reeling the country, the Fed regulated AT&T out of any computing business.

Unix became a cloistered prodigy child just running switching for the next twenty years 'til the AT&T break up in 1984. The break up allowed AT&T to get back into the computing game that IBM kibitzed them out of two decades ago. One was licensing the now, C language based, Unix V to Berkley as a "research base" that was the genesis for Sun Microsystems, SGI, SCO Unix and a bunch of other Unix variants over the next ten years.

You just read from Chapter Four onward in the history of Unix not knowing the real start in the hey day of Teletype and paper-tape. ;)

Sidelight: AT&T tried to energize their long-awaited re-entry into computing by buying an original IBM rival, NCR (which they later divested when they proved incompetent at competing with Big Blue). International Business Machines had already been in a name game of one-upsmanship over what was "only" National Cash Registers way back in the day, so the new, freed AT&T tried to take it to the next level by re-christening their NCR unit as GBS: Global Business Systems.

Didn't work out - but an obscure industry story I enjoy because it took about 3/4 of a century to play out.....
 
  1. Google joins bidding consortium
  2. Consortium wins bid
  3. Consortium sues Android OEMs, forcing Google into a lawsuit against its partners.

That is one scenario where this is worse. Again, we don't know what Google's intentions were for the patents. For all we know, their intentions (maybe a free-license to the patents for Android OEMs) was completely incompatible with the consortium's wish.

Again I ask, why assume the worse ? Obviously, there's a reason Google didn't join the consortium. You want to assume greed, fine. I'd rather keep a level head and assume their reasons were purely intentional incompatibilities. Google wanted to do X, the Consortium Y. Thus Google decided not to join and try to go at it alone.

If you guys want to plainly just "take sides" and hate on Google, seriously, you need to realise all these corporations don't care about your support in this. Google didn't even voice their opinion here, this is 1 employee saying something on his blog, you're taking this as Google's official position and running with it. I don't see any press release here or official statement. Yet, again, Macrumors is all hate, hate, hate, hate. Just because there's Google in the story headline.

The worst is assumed because google bid on these very patents, lost and then turned around and called them bogus...not rocket science
 
ISidelight: AT&T tried to energize their long-awaited re-entry into computing by buying an original IBM rival, NCR (which they later divested when they proved incompetent at competing with Big Blue). International Business Machines had already been in a name game of one-upsmanship over what was "only" National Cash Registers way back in the day, so the new, freed AT&T tried to take it to the next level by re-christening their NCR unit as GBS: Global Business Systems.

Didn't work out - but an obscure industry story I enjoy because it took about 3/4 of a century to play out.....

If you liked that, there are a lot of mid 20th century Bell Lab projects that had some established industries fighting back hard keeping AT&T as a acoustic phone company only.

Another big tragedy is that of PicturePhone. It was shown in the 1964 Worlds Fair to very positive reviews. While the cover story is that there wasn't enough interest and it was too expensive, was told that the real nemesis that killed that project was David Sarnoff himself.

The idea of video transmitting through the phone system totally panicked both RCA and the NAB. This would create a medium that would take away viewership from the then "big three" networks. Again, the Fed was petitioned to limit wiring of AT&T so it only had bandwidth for acoustics. I think the pat arguments is that video in the phone system would make the whole Ma Bell network "too complicated" and "less reliable."

This was bypassed a bit by creating a different, then relatively unregulated utility, -- cable television. The early days of cable television in the 70's is worth a movie. Broadcast television station techs would cut cable TV lines and even have police arrest cable television installation technicians on grounds of interfering with public utilities. It wasn't til HBO and their big margins moved in to settle the score.

Again, the AT&T breakup let broadband evolve to where packet switching had video conferencing happening thirty years later. We even have it on handheld systems since the bandwidth is there now.

All of this would make a great book. Like, "The Supressed Inventions of Bell Labs." I'm sure there are enough retired Bell Labs engineers out there ready to tell their tale while they are still around.

IMO, the big fight now is WiMax and how short sighted local TV station owners are trying to keep it out of "their" towns.
 
Again, we don't know what Google's intentions were for the patents. For all we know, their intentions (maybe a free-license to the patents for Android OEMs) was completely incompatible with the consortium's wish.

Again I ask, why assume the worse ? Obviously, there's a reason Google didn't join the consortium. You want to assume greed, fine. I'd rather keep a level head and assume their reasons were purely intentional incompatibilities.
People here are just talking about facts that have occurred in this little drama. You are the one assuming things. One, about the thoughts of other posters; two, about Google.

If your assumptions about Google's wonderfulness are true, where is the contradictory press release with a more official statement? We see those constantly when some employee of a major company blows off steam. Bueller?

I'm sorry, but this quote is far beyond your little wonderfulness dream, considering Google's actual bid:
Google Blog said:
a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.

And this one from the update....do I actually have to say anything? A lawyer wrote this? The head of Google's law dept?
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.
 
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