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Dutch Court Rejects Samsung Patent Claims Against Apple
angry tapir writes "A judge at the district court in the Hague has rejected claims that Samsung had made against Apple regarding four patents. Samsung wanted Apple to pay for licensing the patents in question, and the court to issue an injunction banning the import and sale of Apple's iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, iPad 2, as well as upcoming products, until licensing terms are in place. But the latter won't happen at this point. The ruling came in the in the same week that an Australian court blocked sales of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1."
The real story here is that Apple and Microsoft are on a coordinated campaign to own all your code.
The notion that you cannot sit down in front of your computer and write code without needing a massive legal department to go up against the likes of Apple and Microsoft as they come to either ban products based on your code or demand a license from vendors based on your code is chilling to say the least
These companies rose on the backs of others. These companies became successful using ideas of others and writing lots of code that was unchallenged by patents for decades. Now they want to use software-patents to raise the barrier of entry so high that even Samsung is having trouble in the marketplace
The companies are also on a mission to use software-patents to make the use of open source software more expensive than their own.
The fact these companies are using the legal system against open source and free software shows that they can no longer compete in the marketplace based on the merits of their own products.
The sad thing here is that they will win and open source will lose and they will become the gatekeepers to all development in the future. The days of free software innovation are coming to an end.