Nokia to sue Apple...

[Tom Mann]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8321058.stm

'Nokia said it had not been compensated for its technology, and accused Apple of "trying to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation".'

Thoughts?

[blueturtl]

Well Apple does the same thing when their patents are infringed.

However I think it's a dumb concept to begin with. I came up with an idea. Someone else came up with the same idea later. I want you to pay for using the idea I first came up with.

If I were a company I'd rather compete by building the best product possible instead of trying to hold back my competitors. It's a business world however and if somebody's got nukes, we need 'em too...

[Dragonbite]

Apple's more sleazy than Microsoft?

[Skripka]

If I were a company I'd rather compete by building the best product possible instead of trying to hold back my competitors.

You're forgetting the MOST important thing. The profit margins on licensing an idea are FAR FAR higher thanfrom producing a product FROM that idea.

[froggyswamp]

The more patent lawsuits are out there the better for the human race cause corporations will hopefully start losing more money on patent lawsuits then getting in return for trolling around and hence someday stop lobbying for keeping (and expanding) them. By then (if ever) the only people who will have to lose if patent system abolished will be the lawyers.

[Dragonbite]

Well Apple does the same thing when their patents are infringed.

However I think it's a dumb concept to begin with. I came up with an idea. Someone else came up with the same idea later. I want you to pay for using the idea I first came up with.

If I were a company I'd rather compete by building the best product possible instead of trying to hold back my competitors. It's a business world however and if somebody's got nukes, we need 'em too...

So then we have 100 companies fighting to become the "standard", not being able to move things from one system to the other and the consumer has to spend their money on one product or another and being stuck with vendor lock-in.

Sounds like what Open Source has been fighting against for some time now!

[Crunchy the Headcrab]

Apple's more sleazy than Microsoft?
Of course they are. They run a MS smear campaign about how unreliable and virus prone Windows is. Meanwhile they fail to fix major flaws in their own OS simply because nobody has attacked them yet. They run a completely proprietary system including many of the same apps that they cry foul for whenever MS tries to include them for free in Windows. They frequently sue people that have apples in their logos, which is pretty ridiculous. They run basically the same hardware as a pc (Macs ARE pc's btw not in the ibm sense but in the hardware sense) including intel processors but they charge about 2/3 again as much as a similarly priced pc. They load everything with DRM and try to make it so that their devices will not work with competitors products (ipod, iphone). They are just general nuisances who are way too smug about their image and deserve to die. The end.

[andras artois]

Brilliant. I think this less Nokia being malegenitaliaheads and more to do with proving you shouldn't try to sue everyone for every little thing or it'll come bite you in the behind.

[norm7446]

Apple started nicking other peoples ideas long ago. You just have to look at Steve Jobs signature on the Xerox Visitor book in 1979, to see how long they have stolen other peoples ideas.

[Exodist]

brilliant. I think this less nokia being malegenitaliaheads and more to do with proving you shouldn't try to sue everyone for every little thing or it'll come bite you in the behind.

+1

[hoppipolla]

woot! :)

[Mateo]

Well Apple does the same thing when their patents are infringed.

However I think it's a dumb concept to begin with. I came up with an idea. Someone else came up with the same idea later. I want you to pay for using the idea I first came up with.

If I were a company I'd rather compete by building the best product possible instead of trying to hold back my competitors. It's a business world however and if somebody's got nukes, we need 'em too...

i think there is balance, but i think the balance is way off currently.

[Dragonbite]

Of course they are. They run a MS smear campaign about how unreliable and virus prone Windows is. Meanwhile they fail to fix major flaws in their own OS simply because nobody has attacked them yet. They run a completely proprietary system including many of the same apps that they cry foul for whenever MS tries to include them for free in Windows. They frequently sue people that have apples in their logos, which is pretty ridiculous. They run basically the same hardware as a pc (Macs ARE pc's btw not in the ibm sense but in the hardware sense) including intel processors but they charge about 2/3 again as much as a similarly priced pc. They load everything with DRM and try to make it so that their devices will not work with competitors products (ipod, iphone). They are just general nuisances who are way too smug about their image and deserve to die. The end.

+.98

I was there with you right up to the "deserve to die" part.

[Crunchy the Headcrab]

+.98

I was there with you right up to the "deserve to die" part.Haha well I exaggerated a lot.

[Grant A.]

I remember that Apple was really nice when they were smaller. I wonder if Canonical, RedHat, or Novell will turn out the same way.

Oracle is big and friendly, but they're a company with tons of money and no motivation... I don't see them as a threat.

IBM has already shown us a dark side, with how it wants things open source, but weighed down by patents.

[markbuntu]

Apple would not hesitate to pursue Nokia in a very hostile manner for patent infringement. Apple was never nice and friendly to competitors, or even their own business partners, never. Behind that friendly public facade is a nasty actor.

I hope they are forced to take thier stupidly expensive i-phones off the market and give all the money to Nokia which is doing great things for linux and open source.

[BuffaloX]

Patents suck.
It's almost impossible to make anything today without infringing someones patent for something.
How many resources are wasted investigating filing licensing upholding patents?

This is just another waste of resources, maybe Nokia just want access to Apples Iphone patents like multitouch. Who knows?

How many of these patents depend on technology developed by Motorola?

I think we would be better off without patents at all.
The concept seems to totally fail it's original purpose.

[samjh]

How many of these patents depend on technology developed by Motorola?

Quite a lot, I expect. But they'd be licensed by Motorola, hence no big multi-million/billion dollar law suits.

[CJ Master]

I hope they are forced to take thier stupidly expensive i-phones off the market and give all the money to Nokia which is doing great things for linux and open source.

So is Apple, with things such as CUPS.

[hoppipolla]

So is Apple, with things such as CUPS.

People always say CUPS. What ELSE have they done?

[schauerlich]

People always say CUPS. What ELSE have they done?

From the link in my sig:


Much of the core of OS X is fully open source (http://www.apple.com/opensource/). Apple maintains a Unix distribution known as Darwin (http://developer.apple.com/Darwin/), which serves as the base for each release of OS X. ... Currently you can download Darwin's source in full here (http://www.opensource.apple.com/). Apple has never intended Darwin to be a distribution for every day use (http://lists.apple.com/archives/Darwinos-users/2007/Oct/msg00006.html); however, a community effort called PureDarwin (http://www.puredarwin.org/) has sprung up to make it more usable. ... Mac OS Forge (http://www.macosforge.org/) is a community project that helps develop the FOSS components of Mac OS X.

Apple has also released several of their own projects under FOSS licenses. The most recent and most significant example of this is Grand Central Dispatch (http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/#grandcentral). GCD is an extension of C (and C based languages such as Objective-C, C++, etc) in the form of libdispatch which makes it easy for programmers to make their apps multi-threaded. For a summary of the technology, see the Ars Technica review of Mac OS X 10.6 (http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/12), as well as Apple's Developer Connection page on it (http://developer.apple.com/mac/articles/cocoa/introblocksgcd.html). Apple's motive for open sourcing one of the main selling points of Snow Leopard is unclear, but the consensus seems to be that their use of blocks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocks_(C_language_extension)) is a non-standard extension of C, and encouraging other Unix based systems to adopt it would benefit everyone.

[mivo]

Sounds like what Open Source has been fighting against for some time now!

And yet each distro does their own thing, we deal with multiple package managers, and so on.

[BuffaloX]

Has Apple really done anything for CUPS? Maybe they just bought it, so they can make their own closed proprietary fork.
If it's GPL2, they can legally do that.

[schauerlich]

Maybe they just bought it, so they can make their own closed proprietary fork. If it's GPL2, they can legally do that.

No, they can't (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPLv2#Version_2), and no, they haven't (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS).

[zekopeko]

No, they can't (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPLv2#Version_2), and no, they haven't (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS).

Yes they can. They bought CUPS and the developer that worked on it now works for Apple. Let's assume that only that developer has copyright on the code. He can relicense it under a proprietary licence and bye bye future CUPS.

[schauerlich]

Yes they can. They bought CUPS and the developer that worked on it now works for Apple. Let's assume that only that developer has copyright on the code. He can relicense it under a proprietary licence and bye bye future CUPS.

It's GPL, which means every person who contributed code would have to approve the licensing change. Not gonna happen.

[BuffaloX]

Sorry I misread an article about Oracle/MySQL/GPL2 and overlooked that it was the original dual license of MySQL that made this possible for Oracle.

[3rdalbum]

While I don't condone the patent system, nor suing anyone over existing patents, I do find it poetic justice that the company that proudly stated that it "patented the hell out of [the iPhone]" is now getting bitten because it trod on someone else's patent.

I live in hope that software and hardware companies will all simultaneously see how the patent system helps none of them in the long term... but I'm afraid it might never happen.

[Dragonbite]

People always say CUPS. What ELSE have they done?


From the link in my sig:

I still don't see how Darwin has really done anything for open source except for a few small pockets of enthusiasts.

[RiceMonster]

I still don't see how Darwin has really done anything for open source except for a few small pockets of enthusiasts.

What about WebKit, though?

[Dragonbite]

What about WebKit, though?

Wasn't that what they worked with the KDE group with, something like KHTML?

I remember reading an article that the KDE (Konquerer?) group was unhappy how after working with Apple, when the project was done Apple walked away and didn't give anything back. I thought it was related to something that went into Safari and I don't know if Apple eventually turned around and gave anything back. Sorry, it was so long ago I have no idea where the article is/was or what it was called. It just sticks out in my mind.