Yesterday Google decided to pledge a total of ten patents that it would not assert against open source software. Google is definitely not a first mover with this type of tactic. IBM has pledged over 500 and Sun Microsystems around 1,600. For IBM and Sun Microsystems, the reception towards these patent pledges were not warmly received. They received initial publicity for their action but people soon realized that their pledges were so limited it made little changes to the ecosystem. Because of this, no one since IBM or Sun has tried this since Google.
So what are they doing different?
According to the author of the article, not much. In fact, they are doing much less. What's worse, Google recently gave HTC patents to sue Apple over. The author is pretty skeptical and unsure of Google's reasoning for doing this.
He brings up an example of Microsoft, who pledged to not sue open source developers on all of this patent portfolios. Also, Microsoft allows individuals to track Microsft patents. Google doesn't provide transparency into its own patent portfolio and so thus no access to the # of total portfolios.
I think the author has a point but many not have considered the value of the individual patents that Google pledged, which could be pretty substantial.
I wonder why Google did not just sue Apple themselves. I assume that Google just has a quick opportunity to hurt Apple so they took the chance.
ReplyDeleteI think Google is trying to stay away from suing as much as possible. HTC however cannot run against Apple without patents to counter-sue since Apple is desperately trying to keep the share of the market they currently have by suing everybody else.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Dove that it is quite strange that Google did not take action against Apple. Though I can see Josef's point that Google may simply want to stay away from as many legal suits as possible nowadays.
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