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Apple and Samsung Agree To Settlement Talks
tlhIngan writes "It looks like the Apple v. Samsung war might be over soon. Both parties have agreed to meet to attempt to reach a settlement. While they are not required to settle (Google and Oracle recently went through the same process), it could be a positive signal that Apple might be willing to license the patents under Tim Cook, versus fight it out in court under the late Steve Jobs."
I hope that this is a sign that saner heads are starting to prevail now that they no longer have an ego-maniac at the helm. Steve Jobs definitely had a very good sense of aesthetics and industrial design, which led to excellent products and services. But by all accounts he was, to put it mildly, an asshole.
I really hope that under the current leadership, Apple will start learning to play more nicely with others without sacrificing the aspects that brought them to the point they're at now.
3G, GSM, etc. are not technical inventions.
They are standards.
When a standards body agrees to take a patent as part of the standard, they generally require FRAND licensing as part of that agreement.
Nowhere anywhere does something *have* to be FRAND, but if you want it in a standard you're going to be going down that road.
Sort of like Samsung saying "how about we do away with this lawsuit and just discount price of the massive amount of memory you're buying from us?"
Samsung is a big company. The Samsung vice president of memory would tell the Samsung vice president of tablet design to f*** off if he were asked to sell memory to Apple cheaper. That's _his_ profit and _his_ bonus on the line, and he won't give that up because some other vice president had to produce a tablet design that gets them sued.