But the point is that it is reducing Google's costs. They fund development of MySQL and PostgreSQL because they use it.
Is that a fact? I have not seen that anywhere. I don't believe that Google uses MySQL and/or Postgres in any significant way, at least for their main revenue product.
I'm not a Google shareholder, but if I were, I wouldn't see such a move as ludicrous. Microsoft is able to enter markets that compete with Google because they can dump boatloads full of cash that they make from Office/Windows/SQL into those markets. Reducing MS' profit margins in those areas directly hurts their ability to compete with Google.
Surely there would be one or two shareholders with a different view. I would expect that the DOJ and SEC would take a dim view of some action that was shown to only be taken to cause harm to a competitor. Microsoft is plausibly trying to make money from Bing whereas the hypothetical situation was for Google to simply bolster some FOSS product solely to damage Microsoft and that would have no plan for making a profit and so qualify as a valid initiative for a public company to pursue. I am sure that is an anti-trust violation.
MS sank a lot of cash into Xbox before going cash positive this year, too, but with a 2+ billion dollar annual profit from games today, the move is certainly justified.
GOOG does not seem to have any revenue model for Android. There are no massive sums of money to use to offset any legal costs of indemnifying OEMs who are offering "Droid" phones.
It all comes down to where the money resides. What is the impact on Google revenues if Android adoption is limited by patent liabilities and resultant licenses? There is a lot of ballyhoo over phone OS "wars", but I do not see where there is any software money at stake.
Hitachi has settled with Microsoft already, so at least one of the OEMs involved sees settlement as an acceptable way of continuing to do business. Companies cross-license or agree on license terms for patents all the time, what is so special here?
The idea of spending a lot of money to develop a competing product in the database server arena that Google would give away to spite Microsoft is rather ludicrous. GOOG is a public company and that kind of frivolity would surely spark a stockholder lawsuit.
But out in the technology world proper, these things cost more upfront and probably take just as much work to integrate.
That is a valid point for a company that has no pre-existing technology. But who is ever in that condition? Everyone else is already using something and that "something" is likely to be Windows and MS Office and Exchange and SQLServer, too. So re-training and data conversion costs have to be considered as a cost of changing to open source solutions.
Computer OEMs do not just put a lot of parts together and tally the cost, multiply by some magic number and so set a price. They pick price points, for example $499, that they think will hit a market segment favorably and then calculate their margins. If $499 is the price point, it is $499 with Windows or with Linux. Quite often different models are priced to make one or another individual model look attractive by the comparison. They may price a good deal at $499 and set a real bare bones model at $449 and an upscale at $699. The user sees that he gets a lot more for an extra $50 with the middle model and doesn't loose much by not going the next $200 and so the $499 looks like a sweet spot. These guys are not geeks or rubes. They sell tens of millions of units a year and have tens of billions of revenues.
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But the point is that it is reducing Google's costs. They fund development of MySQL and PostgreSQL because they use it.
Is that a fact? I have not seen that anywhere. I don't believe that Google uses MySQL and/or Postgres in any significant way, at least for their main revenue product.
I'm not a Google shareholder, but if I were, I wouldn't see such a move as ludicrous. Microsoft is able to enter markets that compete with Google because they can dump boatloads full of cash that they make from Office/Windows/SQL into those markets. Reducing MS' profit margins in those areas directly hurts their ability to compete with Google.
Surely there would be one or two shareholders with a different view. I would expect that the DOJ and SEC would take a dim view of some action that was shown to only be taken to cause harm to a competitor. Microsoft is plausibly trying to make money from Bing whereas the hypothetical situation was for Google to simply bolster some FOSS product solely to damage Microsoft and that would have no plan for making a profit and so qualify as a valid initiative for a public company to pursue. I am sure that is an anti-trust violation. MS sank a lot of cash into Xbox before going cash positive this year, too, but with a 2+ billion dollar annual profit from games today, the move is certainly justified.
GOOG does not seem to have any revenue model for Android. There are no massive sums of money to use to offset any legal costs of indemnifying OEMs who are offering "Droid" phones.
It all comes down to where the money resides. What is the impact on Google revenues if Android adoption is limited by patent liabilities and resultant licenses? There is a lot of ballyhoo over phone OS "wars", but I do not see where there is any software money at stake. Hitachi has settled with Microsoft already, so at least one of the OEMs involved sees settlement as an acceptable way of continuing to do business. Companies cross-license or agree on license terms for patents all the time, what is so special here? The idea of spending a lot of money to develop a competing product in the database server arena that Google would give away to spite Microsoft is rather ludicrous. GOOG is a public company and that kind of frivolity would surely spark a stockholder lawsuit.
But out in the technology world proper, these things cost more upfront and probably take just as much work to integrate.
That is a valid point for a company that has no pre-existing technology. But who is ever in that condition? Everyone else is already using something and that "something" is likely to be Windows and MS Office and Exchange and SQLServer, too. So re-training and data conversion costs have to be considered as a cost of changing to open source solutions.
Computer OEMs do not just put a lot of parts together and tally the cost, multiply by some magic number and so set a price. They pick price points, for example $499, that they think will hit a market segment favorably and then calculate their margins. If $499 is the price point, it is $499 with Windows or with Linux. Quite often different models are priced to make one or another individual model look attractive by the comparison. They may price a good deal at $499 and set a real bare bones model at $449 and an upscale at $699. The user sees that he gets a lot more for an extra $50 with the middle model and doesn't loose much by not going the next $200 and so the $499 looks like a sweet spot. These guys are not geeks or rubes. They sell tens of millions of units a year and have tens of billions of revenues.