Ooooh. What the article MEANS is "betting on HTML5 as a MOBILE strategy instead of writing native SMARTPHONE applications was a mistake." That's much less broad.
Also, as HTML5 is still in its infancy and not yet a finished standard, I think it's kind of early to make this statement.
It's FaceTime on an iPhone, so I seriously doubt AT&T had any say in its inclusion with the phone. Which means that no, you can't remove it at all, although you can download additional videochat apps if you so wish.
We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.
What's the practical distinction to US citizens, though? We access the whole Internet through US-based ISPs, and the US government can impose regulations on ISPs, so as far as I'm concerned the government has the ability to control the Internet.
Of course, I would much rather have them in control than the ISPs themselves...
This annoys me greatly. It's supposed to be my device, HTC. (I would remove Flash completely if I could. I don't ever seem to visit websites that need Flash on my phone.)
Not to rub salt in your wound, but this seems kind of ironic given that the logic behind a lot of the attacks on iOS is that users should be able to choose whether they want to use it or not. It seems to me that not having the option not to use Flash is just as bad as not having the option to use it.
Am I missing something here that says we have to compare all these people on the merits of their accomplishments?
Steve Jobs did great things. Dennis Ritchie did great things as well. We can argue all day about who was "better" or "more influential", but what's the point? Why not just celebrate their lives to honor them, instead of to passive-aggressively piss off people who look up to someone else?
If you celebrate Dennis Ritchie, do it for his monumental contributions to computing. If you do it just because you think Steve Jobs got too much attention, you're doing a disservice to both of their memories.
Yes, and in this case those rules state that you must return found property to its owner, or—if you can't find its owner—the police, otherwise it's stealing.
What crime was committed? He found some prototype in a bar and sold it to some news website. What crime was committed, exactly? The guy didn't sign an NDA or anything.
Theft? Selling stolen property? If you lost your phone and the person who found it decided to sell it instead of return it to you, would it be a crime then? Or does it only become okay when it happens to a company you dislike?
Thaaaaaaaaaat is not Techdirt. It's a publication with a similar name but which I've never heard of (and also seems to harbor some odd hatred for Apple).
How is it bad for someone with no programming knowledge that they aren't free to, for example, look at the source code of iOS or distribute modified versions?
In California, not turning in to the authorities a found object with a value greater than $100 is considered stealing.
They stated, simply, that if it did belong to Apple, which was not a 100% certainty but was likely, that all Apple had to do was to ask for it back through proper channels.
Because it only confirms that it belongs to Apple if Apple makes a public announcement, not asks for it back privately, right?
Instead, we saw what happened. I would rather a judge have found for them and dismissed with prejudice, but at least it appears to be working out.
I realize there's a presumption of innocence and they haven't been found guilty of anything, but come on, man. They publicly acknowledged purchasing property they knew was stolen, destroyed it, and when the owners asked for it back they wouldn't listen unless the owners would announce publicly that it was theirs. They indisputably broke the law in more than one way, and it sucks to see them getting off scot-free.
Just because YOU have described it that way doesn't make it valid. Google has a legitimate, and indeed more sustainable, business model. Deriving revenues from royalties on the platform (hardware / OS) is a loser of a business model because the margins on the platform will be constantly driven downwards. Telecom carriers routinely give away the phones to make money on data/voice services (with 2 and 3 year contracts). Google's approach to make the platform ubiquitous and make money on ads and content is simply an extension of their core business to the mobile space.
No one's deriving money from royalties—Apple is literally selling customers iPhones, and Microsoft is making OEMs license Windows. Google makes their money from advertising; Android is a loss leader for them. It is definitely a legitimate business model, but "more sustainable"? Please. Charging people money for the things you've created is the oldest business model in the world, and I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon.
Also: telecom carriers do not give away phones, they're subsidized into the cost of the contract. It might be free up front, but you're actually paying for it every month (this is why termination fees exist: because if you terminate your contract early, you have to pay off the rest of the phone). The phone manufacturers get paid every cent of what that "free" phone costs. Sure, it goes down in value over time, but what piece of technology doesn't?
I'm sure Google would be fine if MS, Apple and Oracle retaliated in the market place with better products and services, but instead they chose to become patent trolls (see below).
MS and Apple have retaliated in the marketplace with products and services. "Better" is arguable, but you can't say their efforts to compete hinge on patent litigation; it's simply not true. Furthermore, they're not "patent trolls"—you can disagree with their use of patent litigation, but as they are actively developing and selling their products, they are not trolling.
It's almost certain than ANY large software product that does anything useful will infringe on some software patent. Google's choice NOT to license Sun's Java patents or not to simply buy Sun Microsystems is more indicative of Google's believe that any patents Android infringes are invalid or worthless.
Right, and if they know that Android infringes on someone else's intellectual property it's their responsibility to license it! This is the real world. Whether you believe software patents should be valid or not, the fact is they're legal right now. Google can't take a stand on principle and expect to get off scott-free.
No one's blaming Google for thinking software patents suck. They're blaming them for trying to get for free what everyone else has to pay for.
It goes to your point above - how does an entrenched market player respond to a disruptive technology . MS was late to the party and ineffective with it's Windows Phone 7. Sun (now Oracle) also missed the boat. They failed miserably to make J2ME relevant for the next generation of smart phones and their strategy to generate "field of use" royalties from the supposedly "open" platform was already driving handset makers such as Nokia to higher performance, royalty free platforms. So after failing to compete in the market place, Oracle and Microsoft chose to become patent trolls instead.
You don't understand what a patent troll is (see above). Whether or not the platforms are "open" is irrelevant. Microsoft, Apple and Oracle are all actively developing and selling products.
Offering consumers an alternative, ad supported revenue model is hardly peeing in the pool.
No, but giving away what other companies must charge for could be described that way.
If you are going to compete in a technology market, you have to be prepared for disruptive market entrants.
If you are going to attempt to disrupt a technology market, you have to be prepared for the existing players to retaliate.
Your assertion that Google is giving away other companies assets is yet to be proven in court.
True, but given their reaction to this patent deal it seems more than likely that they think Android might infringe on at least a few of those patents.
Of Apple, Microsoft and Oracle, only Apple has actually innovated in the mobile market, and they chose to do so with a "walled garden" strategy that is vulnerable to competition from a more open alternative.
Let's be clear: Microsoft, Apple and Oracle teamed up for the Novell patents, not the Nortel patents. And guess what: Google was invited to join up with that group to bid! They declined, bid on their own, and lost. That's entirely Google's fault, not Apple and Microsoft teaming up to take Google down.
Also, no one is blaming Google for complaining about software patents (especially on Slashdot). The patent system is broken. The reason people are calling Google hypocritical is because they played the patent game and bid for the patents, and only complained about the patents being "bogus" and their competitors being "unfair" when they lost. Google's not standing on principle here, they're just being sore losers.
They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them.
Google already knows and is being attacked by patents already held by those companies and wanted the Nortel patents as protection against these thugs, joining them does the same thing as losing the bid. oh, but it costs them no money.
Incorrect. If Google had bid jointly with Microsoft or whomever and won, Microsoft wouldn't be able to sue Google for violating those patents since Google would co-own them. Microsoft and the other companies can sue Google precisely because they have no ownership in the patents, which is entirely Google's fault for not bidding jointly when they were offered the chance.
Microsoft's public statement about asking Google to join them was 100% PR. Remember, Microsoft had been caught assigning no less than 12 employees to one guy writing an article on a Microsoft product and even handed out coaching instructions analysed by psychologists to direct the author to write the article they way they wanted it. Not to mention that the magazine editor was hounded by a Microsoft employee to get the article written in the first place. Talk about The Wizard of Oz syndrome, Microsoft is a PR firm first and foremost.
This has nothing to do with anything. Microsoft asked Google to bid jointly with them, and they declined. Who cares what they did to some dude writing an article about a Microsoft product?
I'm not saying Apple is a larger proponent of open source than Google, I'm just saying that this whole "Apple is closed, Google is open" fallacy needs to stop. Both companies only open their technologies when it doesn't impact their revenues, which happen to come from totally different places (Apple will probably never open up most of iOS, and call me when Google releases the source to AdWords).
Yes, in general Google has been more committed to open source than Apple. But that doesn't mean that Google is "open," or that Apple is "closed." It's not that black and white.
I won't say that this argument proves much about Apple's attitude towards openness. Webkit is based on KHTML [wikimedia.org] which is LGPL and authorship not residing with Apple, so they absolutely had to open it up to satisfy the license.
Apple didn't have to choose KHTML as the basis for their layout engine, though. They could just have easily (well, maybe not just as easily) written their own engine from scratch, or found (or purchased) another engine to use. I'm sure Opera wouldn't have argued if Apple tried to put their browser in front of every Mac user.
The Darwin kernel is based on other free software work [wikimedia.org] (mostly BSD?), BTW. No, the BSD license might not force Apple to open-source it, but it doesn't hurt so much, open-sourcing code that's freely available anyways.
Honestly, I'm not sure at all how much of that code is Apple's own, or how free they are required to make it by the license, but it is under active development, so they at least deserve some credit for that.
If you want a more complete list of Apple open source projects, you can find it here. Some of those are Apple's own and some it looks like they're just distributing them, but still.
I'm not saying that this particular argument should sway you one way or the other on the H.264 vs. WebM debate, I just think that the "I would go with WebM because Google is open and Apple is not" argument is tired, inaccurate and unconvincing.
Who profits most from open protocols? Who profits most from DRM? The distinction is clear, and MS or Apple bashing Google is just laughable at this point. They are the ones who for years profited from DRM while Google profited from linking to open sites and content.
So Google is open because they made... a search engine? Because "linking to sites" is required for that. Where's the distinction between "open" and "closed" sites, anyway?
Also, how do Microsoft and Apple profit from DRM? Microsoft doesn't sell anything they could attach DRM to, and iTunes has been DRM-free for a while.
It's simply not true to say that Apple doesn't value openness - their products may be closed, but they often open-source significant portions of them. Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, is open source, for example, as well as Webkit, Apple's browser layout engine used in most browsers today, including Google Chrome and Android. And Grand Central Dispatch. And FaceTime. I could go on.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooooh. What the article MEANS is "betting on HTML5 as a MOBILE strategy instead of writing native SMARTPHONE applications was a mistake." That's much less broad. Also, as HTML5 is still in its infancy and not yet a finished standard, I think it's kind of early to make this statement.
It's FaceTime on an iPhone, so I seriously doubt AT&T had any say in its inclusion with the phone. Which means that no, you can't remove it at all, although you can download additional videochat apps if you so wish.
then-Palm CEO Ed Colligan in 2006:
We all know how well that turned out for them.
What's the practical distinction to US citizens, though? We access the whole Internet through US-based ISPs, and the US government can impose regulations on ISPs, so as far as I'm concerned the government has the ability to control the Internet.
Of course, I would much rather have them in control than the ISPs themselves...
That's not how it works. The reason they can do that with this Internet is that they were the ones who invented it in the first place.
This annoys me greatly. It's supposed to be my device, HTC. (I would remove Flash completely if I could. I don't ever seem to visit websites that need Flash on my phone.)
Not to rub salt in your wound, but this seems kind of ironic given that the logic behind a lot of the attacks on iOS is that users should be able to choose whether they want to use it or not. It seems to me that not having the option not to use Flash is just as bad as not having the option to use it.
Am I missing something here that says we have to compare all these people on the merits of their accomplishments?
Steve Jobs did great things. Dennis Ritchie did great things as well. We can argue all day about who was "better" or "more influential", but what's the point? Why not just celebrate their lives to honor them, instead of to passive-aggressively piss off people who look up to someone else?
If you celebrate Dennis Ritchie, do it for his monumental contributions to computing. If you do it just because you think Steve Jobs got too much attention, you're doing a disservice to both of their memories.
That is fanboy cherry picking. Go google tablet PC and check out all the old XP running tablet PCs that looked basically just like an iPad years ago.
I did. Here are the first five; tell me which of them looks remotely like an iPad to you?
Courts have rules too you know.
Yes, and in this case those rules state that you must return found property to its owner, or—if you can't find its owner—the police, otherwise it's stealing.
And where is the contention here, exactly?
What crime was committed? He found some prototype in a bar and sold it to some news website. What crime was committed, exactly? The guy didn't sign an NDA or anything.
Theft? Selling stolen property? If you lost your phone and the person who found it decided to sell it instead of return it to you, would it be a crime then? Or does it only become okay when it happens to a company you dislike?
That is the full article.
Thaaaaaaaaaat is not Techdirt. It's a publication with a similar name but which I've never heard of (and also seems to harbor some odd hatred for Apple).
How is it bad for someone with no programming knowledge that they aren't free to, for example, look at the source code of iOS or distribute modified versions?
They didn't steal it.
They openly acknowledged how they got it.
In California, not turning in to the authorities a found object with a value greater than $100 is considered stealing.
They stated, simply, that if it did belong to Apple, which was not a 100% certainty but was likely, that all Apple had to do was to ask for it back through proper channels.
Because it only confirms that it belongs to Apple if Apple makes a public announcement, not asks for it back privately, right?
Instead, we saw what happened. I would rather a judge have found for them and dismissed with prejudice, but at least it appears to be working out.
I realize there's a presumption of innocence and they haven't been found guilty of anything, but come on, man. They publicly acknowledged purchasing property they knew was stolen, destroyed it, and when the owners asked for it back they wouldn't listen unless the owners would announce publicly that it was theirs. They indisputably broke the law in more than one way, and it sucks to see them getting off scot-free.
Just because YOU have described it that way doesn't make it valid. Google has a legitimate, and indeed more sustainable, business model. Deriving revenues from royalties on the platform (hardware / OS) is a loser of a business model because the margins on the platform will be constantly driven downwards. Telecom carriers routinely give away the phones to make money on data/voice services (with 2 and 3 year contracts). Google's approach to make the platform ubiquitous and make money on ads and content is simply an extension of their core business to the mobile space.
No one's deriving money from royalties—Apple is literally selling customers iPhones, and Microsoft is making OEMs license Windows. Google makes their money from advertising; Android is a loss leader for them. It is definitely a legitimate business model, but "more sustainable"? Please. Charging people money for the things you've created is the oldest business model in the world, and I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon.
Also: telecom carriers do not give away phones, they're subsidized into the cost of the contract. It might be free up front, but you're actually paying for it every month (this is why termination fees exist: because if you terminate your contract early, you have to pay off the rest of the phone). The phone manufacturers get paid every cent of what that "free" phone costs. Sure, it goes down in value over time, but what piece of technology doesn't?
I'm sure Google would be fine if MS, Apple and Oracle retaliated in the market place with better products and services, but instead they chose to become patent trolls (see below).
MS and Apple have retaliated in the marketplace with products and services. "Better" is arguable, but you can't say their efforts to compete hinge on patent litigation; it's simply not true. Furthermore, they're not "patent trolls"—you can disagree with their use of patent litigation, but as they are actively developing and selling their products, they are not trolling.
It's almost certain than ANY large software product that does anything useful will infringe on some software patent. Google's choice NOT to license Sun's Java patents or not to simply buy Sun Microsystems is more indicative of Google's believe that any patents Android infringes are invalid or worthless.
Right, and if they know that Android infringes on someone else's intellectual property it's their responsibility to license it! This is the real world. Whether you believe software patents should be valid or not, the fact is they're legal right now. Google can't take a stand on principle and expect to get off scott-free.
No one's blaming Google for thinking software patents suck. They're blaming them for trying to get for free what everyone else has to pay for.
It goes to your point above - how does an entrenched market player respond to a disruptive technology . MS was late to the party and ineffective with it's Windows Phone 7. Sun (now Oracle) also missed the boat. They failed miserably to make J2ME relevant for the next generation of smart phones and their strategy to generate "field of use" royalties from the supposedly "open" platform was already driving handset makers such as Nokia to higher performance, royalty free platforms. So after failing to compete in the market place, Oracle and Microsoft chose to become patent trolls instead.
You don't understand what a patent troll is (see above). Whether or not the platforms are "open" is irrelevant. Microsoft, Apple and Oracle are all actively developing and selling products.
Offering consumers an alternative, ad supported revenue model is hardly peeing in the pool.
No, but giving away what other companies must charge for could be described that way.
If you are going to compete in a technology market, you have to be prepared for disruptive market entrants.
If you are going to attempt to disrupt a technology market, you have to be prepared for the existing players to retaliate.
Your assertion that Google is giving away other companies assets is yet to be proven in court.
True, but given their reaction to this patent deal it seems more than likely that they think Android might infringe on at least a few of those patents.
Of Apple, Microsoft and Oracle, only Apple has actually innovated in the mobile market, and they chose to do so with a "walled garden" strategy that is vulnerable to competition from a more open alternative.
How is this relevant?
Let's be clear: Microsoft, Apple and Oracle teamed up for the Novell patents, not the Nortel patents. And guess what: Google was invited to join up with that group to bid! They declined, bid on their own, and lost. That's entirely Google's fault, not Apple and Microsoft teaming up to take Google down.
Also, no one is blaming Google for complaining about software patents (especially on Slashdot). The patent system is broken. The reason people are calling Google hypocritical is because they played the patent game and bid for the patents, and only complained about the patents being "bogus" and their competitors being "unfair" when they lost. Google's not standing on principle here, they're just being sore losers.
They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them.
Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/when-patents-attack-android.html
TFS might have mixed up Novell and Nortel, but Google complained about other companies banding together for both deals.
Because, as an owner of the patents, Google couldn't license them to Samsung, Motorola and HTC, right?
Google already knows and is being attacked by patents already held by those companies and wanted the Nortel patents as protection against these thugs, joining them does the same thing as losing the bid. oh, but it costs them no money.
Incorrect. If Google had bid jointly with Microsoft or whomever and won, Microsoft wouldn't be able to sue Google for violating those patents since Google would co-own them. Microsoft and the other companies can sue Google precisely because they have no ownership in the patents, which is entirely Google's fault for not bidding jointly when they were offered the chance.
Microsoft's public statement about asking Google to join them was 100% PR. Remember, Microsoft had been caught assigning no less than 12 employees to one guy writing an article on a Microsoft product and even handed out coaching instructions analysed by psychologists to direct the author to write the article they way they wanted it. Not to mention that the magazine editor was hounded by a Microsoft employee to get the article written in the first place. Talk about The Wizard of Oz syndrome, Microsoft is a PR firm first and foremost.
This has nothing to do with anything. Microsoft asked Google to bid jointly with them, and they declined. Who cares what they did to some dude writing an article about a Microsoft product?
Oh, wow. I was thinking in terms of music, etc. when I posted that. (Zune Marketplace is DRM-free). Didn't even think of software. Embarrassing...
I'm not saying Apple is a larger proponent of open source than Google, I'm just saying that this whole "Apple is closed, Google is open" fallacy needs to stop. Both companies only open their technologies when it doesn't impact their revenues, which happen to come from totally different places (Apple will probably never open up most of iOS, and call me when Google releases the source to AdWords).
Yes, in general Google has been more committed to open source than Apple. But that doesn't mean that Google is "open," or that Apple is "closed." It's not that black and white.
I won't say that this argument proves much about Apple's attitude towards openness. Webkit is based on KHTML [wikimedia.org] which is LGPL and authorship not residing with Apple, so they absolutely had to open it up to satisfy the license.
Apple didn't have to choose KHTML as the basis for their layout engine, though. They could just have easily (well, maybe not just as easily) written their own engine from scratch, or found (or purchased) another engine to use. I'm sure Opera wouldn't have argued if Apple tried to put their browser in front of every Mac user.
The Darwin kernel is based on other free software work [wikimedia.org] (mostly BSD?), BTW. No, the BSD license might not force Apple to open-source it, but it doesn't hurt so much, open-sourcing code that's freely available anyways.
Honestly, I'm not sure at all how much of that code is Apple's own, or how free they are required to make it by the license, but it is under active development, so they at least deserve some credit for that.
If you want a more complete list of Apple open source projects, you can find it here. Some of those are Apple's own and some it looks like they're just distributing them, but still.
I'm not saying that this particular argument should sway you one way or the other on the H.264 vs. WebM debate, I just think that the "I would go with WebM because Google is open and Apple is not" argument is tired, inaccurate and unconvincing.
Obviously support on iOS devices isn't the only factor, but you can't deny that they're a major industry player, and carry a lot of weight.
Who profits most from open protocols? Who profits most from DRM? The distinction is clear, and MS or Apple bashing Google is just laughable at this point. They are the ones who for years profited from DRM while Google profited from linking to open sites and content.
So Google is open because they made... a search engine? Because "linking to sites" is required for that. Where's the distinction between "open" and "closed" sites, anyway?
Also, how do Microsoft and Apple profit from DRM? Microsoft doesn't sell anything they could attach DRM to, and iTunes has been DRM-free for a while.
It's simply not true to say that Apple doesn't value openness - their products may be closed, but they often open-source significant portions of them. Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, is open source, for example, as well as Webkit, Apple's browser layout engine used in most browsers today, including Google Chrome and Android. And Grand Central Dispatch. And FaceTime. I could go on.