LAST NIGHT we wrote about Apple's lawsuit against Motorola for its Linux-powered phones. Feedback in Identi.ca about this post was okay, but in Twitter the site was told off for not discussing Motorola's lawsuit against Apple. For those who are new to this landscape, here is an older bunch of mobile patent lawsuits maps. It has become hard to keep track without one. After some discussion it was almost agreed that, even as a Microsoft-sympathetic mobbyist put it, "Motorola vs. Apple was a preemptive strike." According to what we learned, maybe Nokia too sued Apple preemptively. Dana Blankenhorn, who entertains the ideas that Microsoft and VMware are the main companies/parties who matter in Fog Computing (it is easily disputable as several others cannot be realistically counted out) and would fight like Novell and Microsoft once did (VMware may soon buy SUSE), also wrote this new post about the "smartphone patent thicket". He correctly pointed out that:
...Microsoft claims to own the whole field of syncing e-mail between a cloud and a device. NTP claims to own the whole idea of wireless e-mail.
How does this spur innovation? It doesn’t. You’re patenting the idea of killing mice. We can’t create a better mousetrap until your patent expires, and then we’re stuck with the first new patent to hit the door.
In a sane world of software patents, you patent your implementation of wireless e-mail, or e-mail sync. You publish your code and if someone goes at it in the same way, they know they’re infringing. The code is the design, and if you aren’t willing to publish that through the patent office it should be no patent for you.
IBM going to revive peer2patent?
NBS believes that this patent recognizes NBS as a clear leader in the Canadian marketplace for smart card personalization. NBS holds many software patents for card issuance and card production equipment in several countries throughout the world.
--James Eagleton, systems product manager for Sun Microsystems
Comments
twitter
2010-10-31 15:45:21
I've found a tenuous link between Microsoft and a previous patent attack on Palm which wrecked the PDA market a decade ago. Palm was forbidden to distribute Graffiti when they lost a software patent lawsuit by Xerox in 2001. Xerox was granted their patent in 1997, one year after the launch of Palm OS, and 120 years after the publication of moon type. As of 2005, Graffiti has been in the hands of the Microsoft proxy, ACCESS. [1][2] How intersting it is that a software patent attack that did so much damage to PDAs almost a decade ago would result in all of Palm OS being shuffled to a company that launched bogus personal attacks on Richard Stallman and worked to do other harm to free software. There are roughly seven years of Graffiti patent left where ACCESS can decide who gets to use it and who does not, and free software users will have to get it from outside the US.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-10-31 15:52:38
twitter
2010-10-31 17:30:09
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-10-31 18:40:15
twitter
2010-10-31 15:54:59
I also remember Microsoft's attack on Palm sync in 2002. I was a palm user at a Fortune 100 company which had drank a lot of Microsoft's koolaid. Sometime around 2001, "security updates" broke sync between Palm and Outlook, which was the required email tool. With some effort, I was able to undo the damage, but I doubt many others would have bothered. Because a lot of scheduling comes by email, this was a crucial break that rendered Palm devices next to useless.
These moves managed to destroy Palm but Microsoft has never been able to make a suitable replacement mobile system. The company is only able to retard and tax others.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2010-10-31 16:07:06
Ycvddf
2011-10-03 03:37:38
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