[sailingparrot]

So, Microsoft signed two deals related to Android/Linux with two companies, the content of those deals are undisclosed. That's pretty much all the facts we have, and this article is trying to tell us that this is an unequivocal proof of MS racketeering the open source community, seriously? Did I miss something?

[toolz]

Are you suggesting MS has legitimate claims to IP used in android? Patent trolling isn't something new to MS, so why would anyone reasonably assume MS isn't patent trolling in the absence of all the facts when we have plenty of information and historical data to make reasonable presumptions?

[scholia]

> Are you suggesting MS has legitimate claims to IP used in android?

Are you suggesting that MS has no legitimate claims to IP used in android? It seems to me that companies wouldn't do thee deals if there was no case to answer. It's not as though (for example) Samsung was a stranger to court action, and it's a much bigger company than Microsoft.

It's also a fact that Microsoft pioneered Unix on PCs in the early 1980s, and that Xenix was the most popular Unix of its day....

"Long before Linus Torvalds was able to write anything useful in C, there was a version of Unix from Microsoft called XENIX that was based on the seventh edition and BSD 4.1 with some interesting enhancements (multiple virtual consoles accessible via Alt-F1, Alt-F2,... Alt-F10 -- later inherited by Linux, record-locking facilities for database programming, etc) and an amazing level of PC friendliness that Linus will try emulate much later by essentially replicating all major design decisions that Microsoft put into XENIX for PC but using an independent codebase." http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/x...

[wstrange]

> It seems to me that companies wouldn't do these deals if there was no case to answer.

That is not the way the system works. For many companies it i s better to pay up for bogus IP claims rather than risk fighting it out in the courts and paying millions in legal fees.

[ocdtrekkie]

Arguably, Microsoft is known to be leveraging about 310 patents for this. There's a decent likelihood that at least a decent number of them are legitimate under current law (your views on where software patents should be aside). They may be able to defeat specific patents, individually, but that burden would be on them. Whereas the wholesale deal from Microsoft covers them from the legit ones and the illegit ones in the pile for probably an overall bargain.

It's probably pretty unlikely even most of the 310 claims would be seen as "bogus". Under current law.

[scholia]

Techrights is an anti-Microsoft hate site, and would never let actual facts -- or the lack of them -- get in the way of its bigotry....

[fit2rule]

How you think you're buying Android, but you're actually still paying for bits of Windows.

That's not fun for a lot of people.