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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how you can expect to keep a neutral tone when equating this to war. That is striking an incendiary tone from the beginning.

Releasing Android was not an "attack". It was entering a market with a competitive product. The fact that Google was able to leverage new methods and resources (open source and the continued evolving of the Linux kernel) to reduce the cost of their offering (to the point of changing where revenue is generated in the product) is a normal market behavior. Pooling monopolistic grants and abusing the legal system to thwart market behavior is not something I think we should condone, regardless of how much the other companies felt under attack.

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The comparison to war was simply a rhetoric device to imply that all is fair in love and war.

> Releasing Android was not an "attack". It was entering a market with a competitive product. The fact that Google was able to leverage new methods and resources (open source and the continued evolving of the Linux kernel) to reduce the cost of their offering (to the point of changing where revenue is generated in the product) is a normal market behavior.

That's one perspective. See my response to the sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6657912) to see another perspective. Google was not the first to think of using Linux for a mobile OS (See: Maemo). But think of where the real competitive advantage for Android came from: Now can you now think why Apple is unhappy?

>* Pooling monopolistic grants and abusing the legal system to thwart market behavior is not something I think we should condone, regardless of how much the other companies felt under attack.*

"Monopolistic grants" is just a biased way to look at the patent system that most of the other tech industry works with just fine. "Abusing the legal system"? Again, let's just keep in mind it was not Apple or Microsoft, but Google which was found by a federal jury to be doing so, and charged millions of dollars for that.

Google did whatever they thought they could get away with legally to get an advantage. These companies are simply doing the same.

I happened to see your other comment when it was just a few minutes old. I almost replied to it directly, but it would only have been to say "huh?" I found it hard to distinguish when you were purposefully being extreme and when you were making actual assertions of your own views (if any). A fine exhibit of Poe's law, I guess, as even though you indicate sarcasm, I'm not sure where it starts...

I wasn't terming them "monopolistic grants" to vilify them (those words are used in the law itself), merely to more clearly express the specific aspects they are pooling that I object to. Specifically, with in more detail, it's the pooling of the patents into a third party to make use of the patents while protecting the parent companies from much of the downsides of using their patents against believed infringers. I term that abusing the legal system. It may not be illegal yet, but that doesn't stop me from deeming it a morally repugnant perversion of how the patent system is supposed to operate.

Google may indeed be guilty of patent infringement based on their actions, but from where I'm standing, it's nowhere near clear. I would prefer less legal maneuvering and more clear cases regarding patents and suspected patent infringement, but unfortunately it's not in patent holder's interests to test whether patents are actually valid, as they are much more useful as a tool to intimidate.

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