[hn_decay]

Not at all. Microsoft and Apple simply want to make sure that Google has nothing to counter their patent attacks with. They don't want Google to have them. Now Google sharing them with its two biggest antagonist...even footing a part of the bill...no surprise that they don't mind that.

[kenjackson]

That's not what it says though. Drummond said, "Google didn't get them", period. You either get them (which they could have) or you don't. Now you can add to that with additional constraints and rationale, which is what Google did in their update, but it's no longer the same statement. It's not a simple clarification, but a change of statement.

Google tried to give the impression that they were blocked from getting the patents at all. Now they reveal their true motivation, which wasn't a simple "get them", but rather a more nuanced "we wanted to get them, and also have them not get them, so that we could use them against them". I think this is a perfectly valid reason Google gives, but its not what they were trying to evoke in their first blog post. They were trying to tug at heart strings at first -- this update is just kind of like, "Oh, big companies doing what big companies do -- again."