Summary: John Drinkwater suggests a possible connection between Apple and Gemalto, just as many suggested a connection between Oracle (which sued Android/Google) and Apple because company CEOs Ellison and Jobs are close friends

Gemalto has sued several companies for distributing or making available the Linux-based Android platform. Gemalto is a close Microsoft partner [1, 2], but John Drinkwater points out in Identi.ca that Gemalto also started working with Apple, as announced or at least just covered few days after the said lawsuit:

Moving from regular SIMs to micro SIMs for the iPad and iPhone 4 was a fairly user-hostile move on Apple's part, seeing how it made moving between an iPhone and virtually any other GSM device quite a bit more difficult; the official explanation (for the iPhone 4, anyway) was that there simply wasn't room for a regular SIM, but that seems unlikely considering that you're only saving 10mm of length, 3mm of width, and 0mm of thickness. A more plausible scenario is that Apple viewed micro SIMs as a way to get ahead of the industry curve a bit and make it unpleasant for users to try to share an iPhone line with other devices, a concept that gets at the core of Apple's mantra of owning the entire ecosystem from end to end.

"[I] dislike conspiracy theories," Drinkwater clarifies, " but, when company (Gemalto) starts suing competitor (Google) of business partner (Apple)… it’s very Microsofty" (in Microsoft's case there are validated examples like it).

If Apple's relationship with Gemalto at least helped (as in contributed) convince Gemalto to sue, then memories of Ellison and Jobs ought to return [1, 2, 3]. All those things can be aggregated encouragers, not necessarily isolated factors. ⬆