Lets you install linux on recent Samsung TVs. It's the same code Canonical grabbed to make their "Ubuntu TV" - so you too can be 133t at next year's CES with your own brand of RedHatTV, or SuseTV, DebianTV, or SlackTV (TV for Slackers!). Turn your TV into PVR and record to USB, etc.
Come on people - TVs running linux are not new. What *is* new is that Canonical, having failed to deliver on their promised android tablets more than 2 years after they were announced, and more than a year after they were supposed to ship, are now looking for something else "shiny" to make people forget abut all their previous failures to ship.
Besides, would you really want to buy a TV that's going to break something on every update?
Except that the supervised drug shoots have been proven to both reduce health care costs AND to help people beat the habit when they finally get to the point where they realize it's either beat the habit or die.
Vancouvers supervised sites more than pay for themselves just in reduced emergency room care, and when the feds tried to shut them down, the Supremes ruled that it would have been both an infringement on the provinces' right to administer their health-care programs, and an infringement on the individuals' right to security of the person by putting them at increased risk of dying.
As someone who has never been into recreational pharmacology, I say just legalize it and deal with it - it's a social, not legal, problem. Or stop being hypocrites and ban alcohol, tobacco, and every other product proven to affect brain function, including coffee, tea, sugar, breakfast cereals, any product containing corn or corn by-products, chocolate (don't you DARE!!!) etc.
Seriously - the war on drugs is hypocritical. It's also one that cannot ever be won. Seriously, the way to reduce drug use is to set an example, and to keep an open, non-judgmental attitude when talking to people who chose to use drugs - not have a bunch of drug-addicted politicians pass laws against it.
Actually, this is not a new problem. 20 -30 years ago, people were going around with chain saws and cutting down aluminium traffic light poles when the price of aluminium went through the roof. Theft always goes up in an economic down-turn, but we'll also always have that "base-line" of thieves who will steal because it's "what they do," not out of necessity.
The real problem is that the damage lingers long after the economy recovers, as people who had to bend corners continue to bend corners. Eventually, it reaches the highest levels, such as BoA, CitiBank, AIG, as "just doing business."
Really? Then you must be the ONLY person alive not to have. With so many laws on the books, it's impossible NOT to have unknowingly broken one of them, whether it's your dog mating with another dog within 1,500 feet of a public school (California) or other such stupidity.
We had the city pass a really stupid law - because kids were holding on to the back of buses during the winter and "sledding", they passed a law making it illegal to hold on to or grasp any part of a vehicle in motion inside city limits. So how are you supposed to steer?
Ditto with the law they passed trying to ban massage parlors by defining massage as the physical manipulation of any part of another persons body - making everything from handshakes to helping your kid blow her nose.
This is the same process as frakking, so it will produce the same results as frakking, which is why it's a frakking bad idea, the only difference being that superheated steam makes an even better lubricant for all your earthquake-generating needs (and why there are no plate tectonics on Venus - no free water).
And you should look up the precedents, that make it clear that they can't even do so going forward if the purposefully ignored the issues for a decade so as to try to increase their potential windfall - it's called the "doctrine of unclean hands" for a reason, and why "submarine patents" usually fail.
The fact is that the constant and variable names, as well as the api, had to be the same - you can't just make up your own magic numbers from scratch. If you did, it would not be the same protocol. That dictates a LOT of how you're going to implement the code. Things like buffer sizes, time delays, etc., as well as the overall flow of your program logic. If you knew the first thing about software development you would realize that function dictates form.
That's too simplistic an answer. If you normally work a 40-hour week, and you are not an owner or director of the business, you are an ordinary employee and can most certainly demand that any extra time worked be paid.
Then they don't have the distractions of everyone else on their phones, everyone else's noise, they probably have enough space to actually put things, instead of the pitiful amount allotted to most cubby-dwellers (32 square feet of flat surfaces is the minimum - desk, table, shelving).
You missed my point on how many devices don't need to use the standard because their storage is either not removable, or very hard to remove, so that people transfer their data via other methods than physically moving the chip from one device to another (and that this can be done for everyone).
However an operating system reading the contents of a mobile device involves treating it as a block device
Flash memory devices don't give direct access to the filesystem - their actual block size is usually WAY larger than what they present to the host system. You're not really formatting it a block at a time (host systems' concept of a block), or writing to it a block at a time (again, host systems' concept of a block).
The underlying file system can be anything - even just a large chunk of battery-backed ram, where "block size" is meaningless at the hardware level.
1. The linux api was too much of a moving target;
2. BSD was more stable;
3. Unlike the Linux world, about 3/4 of the BSDs are using FreeBSD, so there's a "standard" as to what a BSD should look like, unlike the mess that continues with the various linux distros moving stuff all over the place;
4. The ports system makes more sense. Major upgrades are far less likely to leave you with a hosed box or other problems;
5. The FreeBSD developers were willing to be paid to work on Darwin, and in return, a lot of that code got plugged back into FreeBSD because it's easier to have the original developers continue to maintain it rather than keep a separate fork alive.
That the end product can be shipped without source is icing on the cake. Everything else being equal (for example, if Linux was dual-licensed w. both GPL and BSD), Linux would still not have made the cut, for the above reasons.
Re:CUPS is GPL! khtml (origin of webkit) is GPL
on
FreeBSD 9.0 Released
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· Score: 1
I don't think anything, I'm just pointing out facts: Apple only shares code when it is forced to. Period.
How was Apple "forced" to share CUPS after buying the code? They share for the same reason Linus gave for every company to share code on ANY project - because they see a benefit in it for themselves. There's no ethical debate here - there's nothing morally or ethically wrong with either closed or open code. What there IS wrong is zealots trying to imply that people who are on the opposite side are evil - and this applies to both camps - whether it's RMS telling people they should pirate closed source programs because the authors deserve it, or wingnuts like Florian Muller who claim that "open source destroys value", which is just a replay of the "broken windows" economic fallacy, while failing to note that it provides opportunities to create value as well.
Both models continue to co-exist because both meet market and user needs, and it's going to stay that way, no matter how much the haters on both sides want it different. In the end, Microsofts' "linux tax" is only a temporary measure. Patents expire all the time - so as long as congress doesn't pull a "Sonny Bono" and extend them to lifetime + 75 years, this whole thing should die a natural death before the end of the decade.
As for Apple, they will continue to play ball as long as open sourcing various projects benefit them. If at some point it no longer does (or maybe they just get fed up with all the whining), they'll say to heck with it, same as any other rational player would. It wouldn't take them that long to come up with a from-scratch closed implementation of a browser widget toolkit, given they have more money than god, and abandon webkit, for example.
The *can't* do it against BSD because of the doctrine of laches. They *can* do it against Linux because they have been whining loudly for more than a decade, so there's no similar "they slept on their rights" argument, as there is with BSD. And they can't claim ignorance of BSD, since they openly used BSD code themselves.
Repeat after me "Android is NOT an OS or Linux". Say it 10, 20, 100 times - however long it takes. The two are completely separate issues.
Also, wrt BSD as a "safe haven" because of laches; it's not just to the people who had a copy at the time. That would be an end run around the whole doctrine of laches. It's not the *owners* of copies f BSD, but BSD itself, that is okay.
Microsoft simply waited too long to sue over BSD, so unless someone breaks the silence over WHAT patents are involved, we'll never know if they're also in BSD or not, but it's irrelevant in either case.
Smart people would look at this as an opportunity. Dalvek was a hack job - google has said that the whole idea was to get something that was quick to market and that people could easily write code for. If they have half a brain (I'm sure they do), they'll be working on a new version that doesn't use dalvek, to get better performance and battery life, because that will keep costs and weight down (smaller batteries while still getting longer running time and better performance - and that's become a real differentiator.).
1. Device manufacturers are ostensibly paying "protection money" for Linux
2. Android is under a separate (and mostly bogus) attack by Oracle. Microsoft can NOT "license" Android without taking on liability for those licenses if Oracle succeeds, and while we might make fun of how stupid Microsoft can be, even they are not *that* stupid... though that would be a fun one to watch...
How long before they go to large data centers and say "nice operation you have there... pay us a license or die"?
Whatever the patents are, they mostly only have a few years (5 or so) to run, so I expect them to make their next move some time in the next year or two before they expire.
Maybe they never will do it - but if they do, that's a heck of a lot of money in play to wring some extra bucks out of some older technology, and maybe more importantly, tie up a competitor in more legal battles. Having tasted the "free money" from the Linux devices tax, they're going to want more, so it's a reasonable bet they'll try to do everything that their proxy SCO tried, now that they've got the kinks worked out.
Rather than screaming how "it ain't ever gonna happen" (just like I used to believe that Microsoft would never be able to "tax" linux - looks like I wasn't the only one who got that wrong), maybe it's time to work harder against software patents, and also CYA by being ready to switch OS? And in the meantime, all other things being equal, if you're developing a new product from scratch, which OS would be the safer bet to avoid being shark bait?
Re:CUPS is GPL! khtml (origin of webkit) is GPL
on
FreeBSD 9.0 Released
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· Score: 1
My point was that Apple *does* share code, contrary to the OP's assertion. And they could have closed off CUPS after buying out the source, or changed the license, but they didn't, so what's your beef?
As for the "It's just marketing" - so what? Even Linus says that he has no beef with companies only contributing when it will benefit them - he fully expects them to behave that way. It's one way to make sure that companies are contributing stuff of real value - because they have a stake in their contribution.
Why do you think that anything less than a total free ride is "evil"? Do YOU work for free?
So, you could have the exact same code in both BSD and Linux from 10 years ago. Microsoft has been b*****ing about it for more than a decade, but only wrt Linux. So, they can "tax" Linux users (like they're doing with Android), but they can't "tax" BSD users, with the exact same code and the exact same patents in play.
It's not even a question of BSD license or GPL - just which one Microsoft publicly targeted because they saw it as a threat to their business.
So, switching to BSD would give shelter from the "Linux Tax" on devices, but Google is certainly in no hurry to do so, because Microsoft isn't asking them for $$$. Google's real stake is in advertising - that the device manufacturers have to pay Microsoft isn't their problem.
The whole thing about BSD is that Microsoft cannot make a claim against it because of the passage of time. Speaking hypothetically, there could be old BSD code that infringes Microsoft IP the exact same way that Linux apparently does (because LG, Samsung, HTC, etc. are paying hundreds of millions of dollars for *something*), but BSD is immune from those claims. Nothing to do with licensing, everything to do with the simple passage of time and Microsoft not making any public statements about possible BSD infringement - unlike how they've been moaning and groaning for more than a decade about Linux, so their right to sue was not "tolled" by the passage of time in the case of Tux.
Even direct copying of the BSD code into Linux would not give it shelter, the same way that your acquired right to walk on someone elses' private property doesn't extend to 3rd parties. This is a problem that could be fixed by the device manufacturers (and google) switching to BSD as the base. Why doesn't Google? Simple - Microsoft isn't putting any pressure on THEM - after all, as long as Microsoft can continue to collect hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the form of a "Linux Tax" on Android, why should they kill the goose that lays the golden patent troll $$$?
This is a discussion that needs to be had, over and over, until the reality sinks in. Personally, I don't care if people use FreeBSD or Menuet something they cobbled together after a month of beer-and-pizza-fueled keyboard-bashing.
The reality is that there are patent trolls out there, they've got money and influence. Microsoft is one of them, obviously, and the "Linux Tax" that most of the device manufacturers make it clear that there's the threat of an additional cost down the road to anyone and everyone who uses Linux.
Microsoft can't make the same claims against BSD because those claims would be "tolled" by the passage of time. It's why Microsoft made all that noise early on about their IP being in Linux - to preserve the right to sue.
Copying BSD code to "make good" any affected portions isn't the solution, because the BSD license only grants the right to copy the code - the "patent shelter" doesn't go along for the ride, any more than your acquired right to use a path on private property after years of doing so doesn't extent to anyone else. So there's a problem, and the GPL doesn't protect against it. Neither does the BSD license - BUT the BSD history does. The exact same (hypothetical) code, with the same (hypothetical) patent infringements, can exist in both, but it's simply too late for Microsoft to even try to make a claim over any hypothetical 10-year-old code when they have remained silent about it for so long.
What they couldn't do via SCO, they've succeeded in doing directly. Most analysts believe they're making more profit off of their "Linux Licenses" for Android than they are off of selling WP7 licenses, and it's only going to get worse.
It certainly doesn't make me happy - to the contrary, I wish that software patents, and those who support them, would just DIAF. But that's not the world we live in, and we have two choices - ignore the problem, or address it. If you have a better solution, preferably one that doesn't involve either an armed insurrection or cameras and sheep, I'm sure LG, Samsung, HTC, etc., would like to hear it. So would I.
The more Krap Koders out there, the more Ca$h fixing the Krap from Krap Koders.
Seems like a variation on the broken window fallacy to me.
If a company spends its entire IT budget on something that doesn't work, surely it has zero money to spend on fixing it?
I think that's a great^WFANTASTIC alternative as well - let them DIAF for all you should care, if they're just going to hire the cheapest, most inexperienced workers around and hope that they can do the job? If they only want to pay 1/5th (or more often, 1/10th) of what something would realistically cost to develop, and they want to try to do it by hiring people who can't do it, who am I to stand in the way of them blowing out their budget and their brains? It's not like they're going to put any money in my pocket (or yours) anyway.
You know how this story ends - they have unrealistic time constraints, a "slap it together and let the customers find all the bugs - even the ones we already know about" mentality, a continuous "crunch time", and poorly defined (and always changing) requirements.
The continuous crunch time is because they set an unrealistic budget and they want it done before the $$$ runs out. Same as why they want to hire the cheapest. They don't want to spend the money it would take, but they still want the benefits, and they try to do it this way because they don't know what they're doing, and don't want to take advice that contradicts what they "need" to hear.
Besides, in this business it's a truism you need the experience of two or three failures or you won't recognize the smell the next time it begins to stink (and it weeds out a lot of the wannabes) - so why not let them go broke - it's all part of culling the herd.:-)
Bad example - linux DID copy the BSD constants and typedefs. This is no secret. I guess you missed the whole "linux kernel headers" issue, as well as the "there's SCO code in linux" (that turned out to be code from BSD).
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Lets you install linux on recent Samsung TVs. It's the same code Canonical grabbed to make their "Ubuntu TV" - so you too can be 133t at next year's CES with your own brand of RedHatTV, or SuseTV, DebianTV, or SlackTV (TV for Slackers!). Turn your TV into PVR and record to USB, etc.
Or you could just do like they did - grab the code from the guys who wrote it, and install ANY linux distro on a linux-based TV.
Come on people - TVs running linux are not new. What *is* new is that Canonical, having failed to deliver on their promised android tablets more than 2 years after they were announced, and more than a year after they were supposed to ship, are now looking for something else "shiny" to make people forget abut all their previous failures to ship.
Besides, would you really want to buy a TV that's going to break something on every update?
Vancouvers supervised sites more than pay for themselves just in reduced emergency room care, and when the feds tried to shut them down, the Supremes ruled that it would have been both an infringement on the provinces' right to administer their health-care programs, and an infringement on the individuals' right to security of the person by putting them at increased risk of dying.
As someone who has never been into recreational pharmacology, I say just legalize it and deal with it - it's a social, not legal, problem. Or stop being hypocrites and ban alcohol, tobacco, and every other product proven to affect brain function, including coffee, tea, sugar, breakfast cereals, any product containing corn or corn by-products, chocolate (don't you DARE!!!) etc.
Seriously - the war on drugs is hypocritical. It's also one that cannot ever be won. Seriously, the way to reduce drug use is to set an example, and to keep an open, non-judgmental attitude when talking to people who chose to use drugs - not have a bunch of drug-addicted politicians pass laws against it.
Actually, this is not a new problem. 20 -30 years ago, people were going around with chain saws and cutting down aluminium traffic light poles when the price of aluminium went through the roof. Theft always goes up in an economic down-turn, but we'll also always have that "base-line" of thieves who will steal because it's "what they do," not out of necessity.
The real problem is that the damage lingers long after the economy recovers, as people who had to bend corners continue to bend corners. Eventually, it reaches the highest levels, such as BoA, CitiBank, AIG, as "just doing business."
Really? Then you must be the ONLY person alive not to have. With so many laws on the books, it's impossible NOT to have unknowingly broken one of them, whether it's your dog mating with another dog within 1,500 feet of a public school (California) or other such stupidity.
We had the city pass a really stupid law - because kids were holding on to the back of buses during the winter and "sledding", they passed a law making it illegal to hold on to or grasp any part of a vehicle in motion inside city limits. So how are you supposed to steer?
Ditto with the law they passed trying to ban massage parlors by defining massage as the physical manipulation of any part of another persons body - making everything from handshakes to helping your kid blow her nose.
It's a safe bet you've broken a few stupid laws.
This is the same process as frakking, so it will produce the same results as frakking, which is why it's a frakking bad idea, the only difference being that superheated steam makes an even better lubricant for all your earthquake-generating needs (and why there are no plate tectonics on Venus - no free water).
And you should look up the precedents, that make it clear that they can't even do so going forward if the purposefully ignored the issues for a decade so as to try to increase their potential windfall - it's called the "doctrine of unclean hands" for a reason, and why "submarine patents" usually fail.
The fact is that the constant and variable names, as well as the api, had to be the same - you can't just make up your own magic numbers from scratch. If you did, it would not be the same protocol. That dictates a LOT of how you're going to implement the code. Things like buffer sizes, time delays, etc., as well as the overall flow of your program logic. If you knew the first thing about software development you would realize that function dictates form.
That's too simplistic an answer. If you normally work a 40-hour week, and you are not an owner or director of the business, you are an ordinary employee and can most certainly demand that any extra time worked be paid.
Then they don't have the distractions of everyone else on their phones, everyone else's noise, they probably have enough space to actually put things, instead of the pitiful amount allotted to most cubby-dwellers (32 square feet of flat surfaces is the minimum - desk, table, shelving).
There's no reason - it's been done before in direct competition with the ICANN, and there are a bunch in operation right now - the problem being getting people to use them instead.
#3 was very important, as they were shooting for, and received UNIX certification.
You missed my point on how many devices don't need to use the standard because their storage is either not removable, or very hard to remove, so that people transfer their data via other methods than physically moving the chip from one device to another (and that this can be done for everyone).
Flash memory devices don't give direct access to the filesystem - their actual block size is usually WAY larger than what they present to the host system. You're not really formatting it a block at a time (host systems' concept of a block), or writing to it a block at a time (again, host systems' concept of a block).
The underlying file system can be anything - even just a large chunk of battery-backed ram, where "block size" is meaningless at the hardware level.
1. The linux api was too much of a moving target;
2. BSD was more stable;
3. Unlike the Linux world, about 3/4 of the BSDs are using FreeBSD, so there's a "standard" as to what a BSD should look like, unlike the mess that continues with the various linux distros moving stuff all over the place;
4. The ports system makes more sense. Major upgrades are far less likely to leave you with a hosed box or other problems;
5. The FreeBSD developers were willing to be paid to work on Darwin, and in return, a lot of that code got plugged back into FreeBSD because it's easier to have the original developers continue to maintain it rather than keep a separate fork alive.
That the end product can be shipped without source is icing on the cake. Everything else being equal (for example, if Linux was dual-licensed w. both GPL and BSD), Linux would still not have made the cut, for the above reasons.
How was Apple "forced" to share CUPS after buying the code? They share for the same reason Linus gave for every company to share code on ANY project - because they see a benefit in it for themselves. There's no ethical debate here - there's nothing morally or ethically wrong with either closed or open code. What there IS wrong is zealots trying to imply that people who are on the opposite side are evil - and this applies to both camps - whether it's RMS telling people they should pirate closed source programs because the authors deserve it, or wingnuts like Florian Muller who claim that "open source destroys value", which is just a replay of the "broken windows" economic fallacy, while failing to note that it provides opportunities to create value as well.
Both models continue to co-exist because both meet market and user needs, and it's going to stay that way, no matter how much the haters on both sides want it different. In the end, Microsofts' "linux tax" is only a temporary measure. Patents expire all the time - so as long as congress doesn't pull a "Sonny Bono" and extend them to lifetime + 75 years, this whole thing should die a natural death before the end of the decade.
As for Apple, they will continue to play ball as long as open sourcing various projects benefit them. If at some point it no longer does (or maybe they just get fed up with all the whining), they'll say to heck with it, same as any other rational player would. It wouldn't take them that long to come up with a from-scratch closed implementation of a browser widget toolkit, given they have more money than god, and abandon webkit, for example.
The *can't* do it against BSD because of the doctrine of laches. They *can* do it against Linux because they have been whining loudly for more than a decade, so there's no similar "they slept on their rights" argument, as there is with BSD. And they can't claim ignorance of BSD, since they openly used BSD code themselves.
Repeat after me "Android is NOT an OS or Linux". Say it 10, 20, 100 times - however long it takes. The two are completely separate issues.
Also, wrt BSD as a "safe haven" because of laches; it's not just to the people who had a copy at the time. That would be an end run around the whole doctrine of laches. It's not the *owners* of copies f BSD, but BSD itself, that is okay.
Microsoft simply waited too long to sue over BSD, so unless someone breaks the silence over WHAT patents are involved, we'll never know if they're also in BSD or not, but it's irrelevant in either case.
Smart people would look at this as an opportunity. Dalvek was a hack job - google has said that the whole idea was to get something that was quick to market and that people could easily write code for. If they have half a brain (I'm sure they do), they'll be working on a new version that doesn't use dalvek, to get better performance and battery life, because that will keep costs and weight down (smaller batteries while still getting longer running time and better performance - and that's become a real differentiator.).
The facts are simple:
1. Device manufacturers are ostensibly paying "protection money" for Linux
2. Android is under a separate (and mostly bogus) attack by Oracle. Microsoft can NOT "license" Android without taking on liability for those licenses if Oracle succeeds, and while we might make fun of how stupid Microsoft can be, even they are not *that* stupid ... though that would be a fun one to watch ...
How long before they go to large data centers and say "nice operation you have there ... pay us a license or die"?
Whatever the patents are, they mostly only have a few years (5 or so) to run, so I expect them to make their next move some time in the next year or two before they expire.
Maybe they never will do it - but if they do, that's a heck of a lot of money in play to wring some extra bucks out of some older technology, and maybe more importantly, tie up a competitor in more legal battles. Having tasted the "free money" from the Linux devices tax, they're going to want more, so it's a reasonable bet they'll try to do everything that their proxy SCO tried, now that they've got the kinks worked out.
Rather than screaming how "it ain't ever gonna happen" (just like I used to believe that Microsoft would never be able to "tax" linux - looks like I wasn't the only one who got that wrong), maybe it's time to work harder against software patents, and also CYA by being ready to switch OS? And in the meantime, all other things being equal, if you're developing a new product from scratch, which OS would be the safer bet to avoid being shark bait?
My point was that Apple *does* share code, contrary to the OP's assertion. And they could have closed off CUPS after buying out the source, or changed the license, but they didn't, so what's your beef?
As for the "It's just marketing" - so what? Even Linus says that he has no beef with companies only contributing when it will benefit them - he fully expects them to behave that way. It's one way to make sure that companies are contributing stuff of real value - because they have a stake in their contribution.
Why do you think that anything less than a total free ride is "evil"? Do YOU work for free?
The interesting part is that even if BSD *were* in violation of the same patents, it's immune due to the passage of time and Microsofts' failure to assert a claim.
So, you could have the exact same code in both BSD and Linux from 10 years ago. Microsoft has been b*****ing about it for more than a decade, but only wrt Linux. So, they can "tax" Linux users (like they're doing with Android), but they can't "tax" BSD users, with the exact same code and the exact same patents in play.
It's not even a question of BSD license or GPL - just which one Microsoft publicly targeted because they saw it as a threat to their business.
So, switching to BSD would give shelter from the "Linux Tax" on devices, but Google is certainly in no hurry to do so, because Microsoft isn't asking them for $$$. Google's real stake is in advertising - that the device manufacturers have to pay Microsoft isn't their problem.
Even direct copying of the BSD code into Linux would not give it shelter, the same way that your acquired right to walk on someone elses' private property doesn't extend to 3rd parties. This is a problem that could be fixed by the device manufacturers (and google) switching to BSD as the base. Why doesn't Google? Simple - Microsoft isn't putting any pressure on THEM - after all, as long as Microsoft can continue to collect hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the form of a "Linux Tax" on Android, why should they kill the goose that lays the golden patent troll $$$?
The reality is that there are patent trolls out there, they've got money and influence. Microsoft is one of them, obviously, and the "Linux Tax" that most of the device manufacturers make it clear that there's the threat of an additional cost down the road to anyone and everyone who uses Linux.
Microsoft can't make the same claims against BSD because those claims would be "tolled" by the passage of time. It's why Microsoft made all that noise early on about their IP being in Linux - to preserve the right to sue.
Copying BSD code to "make good" any affected portions isn't the solution, because the BSD license only grants the right to copy the code - the "patent shelter" doesn't go along for the ride, any more than your acquired right to use a path on private property after years of doing so doesn't extent to anyone else. So there's a problem, and the GPL doesn't protect against it. Neither does the BSD license - BUT the BSD history does. The exact same (hypothetical) code, with the same (hypothetical) patent infringements, can exist in both, but it's simply too late for Microsoft to even try to make a claim over any hypothetical 10-year-old code when they have remained silent about it for so long.
What they couldn't do via SCO, they've succeeded in doing directly. Most analysts believe they're making more profit off of their "Linux Licenses" for Android than they are off of selling WP7 licenses, and it's only going to get worse.
It certainly doesn't make me happy - to the contrary, I wish that software patents, and those who support them, would just DIAF. But that's not the world we live in, and we have two choices - ignore the problem, or address it. If you have a better solution, preferably one that doesn't involve either an armed insurrection or cameras and sheep, I'm sure LG, Samsung, HTC, etc., would like to hear it. So would I.
I think that's a great^WFANTASTIC alternative as well - let them DIAF for all you should care, if they're just going to hire the cheapest, most inexperienced workers around and hope that they can do the job? If they only want to pay 1/5th (or more often, 1/10th) of what something would realistically cost to develop, and they want to try to do it by hiring people who can't do it, who am I to stand in the way of them blowing out their budget and their brains? It's not like they're going to put any money in my pocket (or yours) anyway.
You know how this story ends - they have unrealistic time constraints, a "slap it together and let the customers find all the bugs - even the ones we already know about" mentality, a continuous "crunch time", and poorly defined (and always changing) requirements.
The continuous crunch time is because they set an unrealistic budget and they want it done before the $$$ runs out. Same as why they want to hire the cheapest. They don't want to spend the money it would take, but they still want the benefits, and they try to do it this way because they don't know what they're doing, and don't want to take advice that contradicts what they "need" to hear.
Besides, in this business it's a truism you need the experience of two or three failures or you won't recognize the smell the next time it begins to stink (and it weeds out a lot of the wannabes) - so why not let them go broke - it's all part of culling the herd. :-)
NEXT!