Google took the initiative a year ago with their Motorola patent portfolio, Samsung took the initiative with their FRAND patents, Apple took the initiative with their design portfolio, Microsoft took the initiative by funding SCO and suing android OEMs and now this conglomerate is taking the initiative with the Nortel patents.
This is a war with many players willing to stifle the industry until this gets sorted out. All players are responsible, but this terrible system requires that you get involved and are proactive in protecting your intellectual property.
Go sell your mac and get an ultra book. Go learn Java and ditch obj-c. But do it because you prefer those products, not because you think you are taking the moral high ground.
That's very different from Apple or Microsoft.
Even if they were sincere when they said that, I fully expect that they would have changed their minds within a few years of actually winning. Remember, they've already shown a willingness to use patents offensively.
Motorola Mobility sued apple in 2010. Just last month Motorola filed a motion to reopen their case against Apple.
Again, all of these companies are deeply involved in this game of patents.
As far as I know Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2011. So they had nothing to do with the original suit. As for last month's one, I don't know about the details.
> I disagree, microsoft tried to destroy linux
Where did I say Microsoft was clean ?
Google has been using SEPs as weapons and undermining standards and the huge benefits they bring to humanity.
What's the point of putting in the work and money to actually develop standards if someone can walk into your industry, take all that work for free, and use their non-FRAND-licensed patents to stop you from selling anything? Far better to forget standards, abandon fundamental technology work, and spend the time and money building your own non-FRAND patent warchest instead.
In the event that the technology discussed in the Document becomes an IETF standard (the "Standard") which is not materially different from the Document, Apple agrees, upon written request from a Party to negotiate outside of IETF to make available a non-exclusive license under reasonable and non-discriminatory ("RAND") terms and conditions under such claims of the Patents that are essential to implement a product compliant with the Standard (a "Compliant Product"). These RAND terms and conditions may be conditional upon a reciprocal grant or defense use.
However it has yet to demand reciprocal grants of design patents from others for licensing.
The company has not refused to license SEPs, it has refused to license them with a cross-patent agreement that includes their design patents, as their view is that SEPs should be offered on fair monetary licensing terms.
That does not necessarily mean their stance is right (or that Apple is innocent because they're quite clearly not), but it's a lot more complex and defensible than you've implied here.
i.e. I always hear of friends and colleagues who switch from the iPhone to Android (and not vice-versa). And from what I've seen Google is also actually making significant improvements Android's API instead of Apple's method of just making aesthetic changes (and some argue making it worse).
UI
Inter-app audio
Background fetch
P2P (arguably, this isn't a new feature, it's essentially a wrapper to dns_sd)
Airdrop
*Actual* SMS/MMS API
Storage access framework
Printing framework
You could say the same about KitKat (except for SMS), so really it boils down to this:
iOS 7:
UI
Background fetch
SMS/MSS API
Plus, Android already has way more features than iOS already, not to mention the ability to install unsigned software, NFC, custom lockscreens/launchers and who knows what else.
It can win just for your hobby or taste, but not for end users. And end-users define the business. Not your taste.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/releasenotes/General...
tne choice isnt between apple and google or microsoft.
the choice is between proprietary vs freedom software.
dump your apples and macs. choose archlinux, gnu and linux-libre.
But seriously: This isn't an issue that'll be solved by buying one product over another.
(I mean, if I understand correctly, this could impact your ability to actually get your hands on a Nexus 5 (or later) device if litigation either prevents them from being produced or makes them too expensive for Google to make. That's the whole point, right? To take the power to choose financial winners and losers out of the hands of the market. To make your decision matter less. That's one big reason it's shitty: It distorts markets regardless what you as the consumer want.)
It's an issue with how our government treats patents like this. Buy your Apple product if that's the best one for you. Enjoy building with Objective C. Or work with Google's products. Whichever you want.
But.
If you're interested in changing this situation, I'd try recommend trying to get the attention of the one organization that really holds the power, here: The United States government.
Well it's certainly easier to vote with your dollars than to change the state of politics. Politics are relatively stable in short-mid run, and even a large group of citizen has very little power to change that unless they get representatives of their own to run for and win elections with a clear no-more-patent-bullshit agenda.
Net: it's not going to happen any time soon.
Anyway, we can see that even in the absence of Steve Jobs, Apple is certainly serious about "going nuclear on Android". They'll follow their former leader's thinking even beyond the grave. That's sad.
If the FOSS projects in mobile work hard enough now, they can eat into Android's market share, at least in the developing world. We shouldn't consider Android's position to be unshakeable.
They're onto the desperate measures now because without Steve they can't hit their revenue targets through actually making better products.
And I'm saying that the reason they're doing it now is because they're out of ideas.
It's basically big corps trying to shoot down each other,it's war. It will not end google search,dont worry,worst case google will have to pay a few billion but they can afford it.
Remember these corporations are using patents as nuclear dissuasion tools,we are not really in patent trolling here.IMHO Google is not better than the rest.
Your attitude suggesting that company revenues have nothing to do with the actions of the company is simply suggesting that people don't vote with their dollars, or maybe that they shouldn't, which is wrong.
Corporations exist to make money, if they make decisions you disagree with, you should not spend your money on their products. You should do what you can to let them know that reason x,y,z is the reason you're not spending your money with them. Enough of a groundswell and that will change.
Interestingly in this case, if a large enough mass of people bought Android phones specifically because of this lawsuit, that is a double-wammy for Apple and Microsoft in the mobile space, and it gives Google a few dollars to pay for the patent suit.
And as I said in another post, Google has a different stance on patents. So far, they pledged not to use them in an aggressive way. Maybe they'll change their mind in the long run, but they have not been very aggressive in that field so far.
But we should all just accept that Google does no wrong by listening to a perennial Apple troll? Do me a favour! That's the problem with you open source terrorist; it all black and white. Google as just as bad as everyone else. They are not doing this out of altruism! If they were, we'd have the source for the Google apps on android, the search algorithms and web apps and they'd all be BSD, not the cancerous GPLv3! They really don't care about your silly ideologies. They care about revenue. That comes from advertising, which requires spying! For fuck sake man, THEY WORKED WITH THE NSA!!! They are pulling the same trick that Microsoft did with nascent IT departments; they convincing you that they are your friends. Hell, they already fucked consumers by giving power back to mobile companies. What is with you people? I frankly cannot believe the utterly childish language I'm seeing; especially from the likes of pg! I suppose you'll be telling me that Samsung are an example of a morally upstanding company next.
There are 5 resolutions to support in iOS. For most purposes, there are only 2 versions to support. What's the situation like on android?
Just because you don't understand an API, doesn't mean you should trash it. Writing APIs is hard. Last I checked I couldn't have more than 1 map on a screen on android with massive trickery.
I've been writing software for a living for fifteen years now and I've yet to encounter a more opaque, complex, and unpredictable API than AutoLayout.
Screen resolution is almost meaningless on Android. Form factor is what matters. Phone (1280x720 being the floor for remotely new devices), small tablet, large tablet.
And let's see whether you can say after that.
Personally, I lost all the technical/engineering respect on Google people after that.
Deploying this patent portfolio offensively can only postpone innovation. It's bad for customers, it's bad for the industry, and I'd argue it's bad for humanity.
Coincidentally, Google released Android 4.4 today. It brings a modern browser with much improved battery life to older, less capable hardware.
This is a win for people of average means, and it extends access to the world's information to people in developing countries that wouldn't have had the opportunity on more expensive hardware. Would we be where we are today without Android?
Use the patents as a defense against patent troll attacks. But when you become a patent troll yourself, you are now the enemy.
Fuck Apple. Fuck Microsoft.
I will do everything I can to avoid their products, even if the alternatives aren't as good. They're both a net-negative for humanity.
The amount of pain involved in setting up a coherent development environment in OS X is almost comical after setting up an equivalent in Ubuntu or Fedora.
Here's a poll. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6652189
For what kind of development? Web dev is pretty damn straightforward and pain-free.
Apple not shipping anything that is GPLv3 means that you have to rely on homebrew, which works great except for when it doesn't, and you end up six hours deep into troubleshooting it. We've run into numerous edge cases where things don't quite work right in OS X, even though it's ostensibly still a POSIX toolchain. The number of hacks, workarounds, and kludges in our OS X environments far exceeds that which our Linux environments have to deal with.
It's by no means impossible to set up, but it's a hell of a lot more complex than it's ever been for me on Linux. I run both a rMBP and a Fedora machine, and development/experimentation is a lot easier on the Fedora machine, because the whole OS is actually built around the concept of a sane package manager and standard library/compiler toolchain, and isn't crippled by licensing pathologies.
Even only for web-stuffs, I still prefer OS X absolutely. What you said is just an early generalization.
I've never owned a Mac, and the last time I used one was in 2004.
> ideal development platform
The other day I wanted to apply the hqx filtering algorithm to some images, with proper handling of transparency. The code I found for this [1] uses the DeVIL image library. After some apt-cache searching, I found that I could do this:
sudo apt-get install libdevil-dev libdevil1c2
> they don't care about what Apple does
I certainly do! Due to the fact that you have to pay a non-refundable fee to the App store and it's hit-or-miss whether your app gets accepted or stays accepted, I've decided to develop mobile apps exclusively for Android.
brew install devilReally until I moved to the Valley I had never really seen people I'd consider "hackers" or "programmers" writing code on anything other than a linux or unix terminal, or in Visual Studio, Eclipse, or some other IDE on Windows. I was actually shocked to see Apple products be so ubiquitous in programmer circles.
Outside of the "web development is all development" monoculture parts of the Valley there is a wide world of software development and developer communities who would basically laugh at the notion that Mac is an "ideal development platform" (some would guffaw at the notion that it's even an adequate one) for anything other than the Apple App Store ecosystem (where it isn't really ideal so much as mandatory, if one wishes to not break laws).
I'd make this conjecture: the vast majority of software development, in the Valley or otherwise, isn't done on Macs; it's really a very small subset of developers who prefer it, and that subset consists mainly of web app and iOS mobile app developers. If the majority of HNers develop software on Apple products, all that means is that HN's primary developer demographic is a tiny subset of the overall industry.
My experience mirrors what you have explicitly stated--most development, web app or otherwise, isn't done on Apple products.
[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/10/31/google-samsung-and...