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Apple and Google Joining Forces On Kodak Patents Bid
TrueSatan writes "Bloomberg reports that Apple and Google have partnered to make a bid of more than $500 million for the Kodak patent portfolio. The bid relates to Kodak's 1,100 imaging patents. 'Kodak obtained commitments for $830 million exit financing last month, contingent on its sale of the digital imaging patents for at least $500 million.' This is likely to be an opening bid, with the final figure being far larger. By comparison, a group including Apple, Microsoft, and RIM bought Nortel's 6000+ patents for $4.5 billion last year. 'Google lost the auction for those patents after making an initial offer of $900 million.'"
Imagine an investment of 500 Million into Libreoffice development. Imagine 50 Million for Wine. That would make a real difference. The patent system is like a parasitarian economy created on top of the markets. It should be abolished. But we won't get 5 million $ for patent reformists.
You did not refute a single one.
Have a look in the history of every article in the last year which matches the string "Google". You will find that either as first post, or very soon afterwards there is a post which puts up lines like "Google is the worst privacy violator" "Google has become worse than Microsoft" etc. etc. In response to those posts will be many posts which completely refute your points. This has been repeated so often it's not funny. I have even posted in some of those discussions myself. For us to repeat those discussions would be "redundant" and I would hate that.
One of the biggest and most common examples of these accusations of Google becoming 'just as bad' is that their buying up patents is a sign they will become just as bad as Microsoft, which is using stupid patents like the one on the FAT filesystem to attack smaller developers (have a look at this Slashdot discussion about TomTom for example). However, we have not yet seen any evidence of this. Google still hasn't sued any small developer companies. However, this is relevant to our topic of discussion because Google working with Apple is new.
Do you think that now that Google has teamed up with Apple it is a sign that they want to join Apple's attacks on competitors? Maybe instead you think that this is a sign that Apple has come to its senses and realised that Microsoft is still a threat to our chances of a standardised mixed computing environment where Google just wants that system to exist so they can continue to have a chance to provide search and advertising?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();