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Apple's patent attackApple's patent attackPosted Mar 3, 2010 2:29 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953)Parent article: Apple's patent attack
Given that a significant number of these patents are being used directly against a Linux stack I personally believe the community should organize and back HTC. Particularly the major organizations and companies (OIN, RedHat, IBM, Google) who support Linux should be stepping into this suit to help defend HTC. Personally the ideal would be for all the organizations I listed to enter a patent agreement with HTC to allow HTC to use the combined patents in defense against Apple. Although Apple will deny it, this is a direct attack on the Android software, and if it's allowed to stand Apple could attack much of the Linux community. If we fail to coalesce and defend a company using Linux we deserve what will ultimately happen to Linux because of patents. We simply must provide a combined defense so other companies think twice before threatening someone using Linux in a product.
Most of these patents are UI patents, How on earth you can patent a UI is beyond me. The equivalent would be patenting the location of a switch on a machine, not the machine itself. (Specifically the patent for a software switch to unlock the keypad, that has to be just about the worst patent ever granted) It's just downright silly. This suit reminds me very much of Apples "look and feel" lawsuit against MS that took a decade to resolve with the courts finally telling apple you can't patent the look and feel of something.
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Apple's patent attack Posted Mar 3, 2010 9:44 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
Or, as per Andrew Tridgell (see http://lwn.net/Articles/371044/ ), the community could get
together to try and create workarounds for those patents and leave Apple with no case.
Apple's patent attack Posted Mar 8, 2010 12:25 UTC (Mon) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link] Why though? I mean, take "#7,657,849: Unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image." There are several physical devices where you have to move or slide a (physical) knob in order to unlock the device. This patent just describes the same thing, done in images on a computer screen. This is just physical affordances translated to the computer screen, in the same way that patenting "online" auctions is not novel because they have existed for centuries "offline". Why should we have to deny ourselves obvious techniques like that? We should keep using them and get rid of obvious software patents instead.
Apple's patent attack Posted Mar 8, 2010 13:32 UTC (Mon) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
The reasoning behind what he had to say was that proving a patent invalid is very hard and
expensive, even if it is trivial to see it.
Apple's patent attack Posted Mar 3, 2010 18:22 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
well the first thing you can all do is stop buying apple's crap
i'm so sick of so-called "hardcore geeks" toting around ludicrously overpriced (and don't go quoting "tco" crap) laptops telling me they "like how it just works"
"Just works" - not exactly Posted Mar 4, 2010 15:31 UTC (Thu) by dbruce (subscriber, #57948) [Link]
While we're a MS-free household, my wife and daughter are both dedicated Apple users (I'm a Linux-based OSS dev). My daughter recently had trouble syncing her iPhone on our iMac, and asked me for help. After disclaiming that I don't know much about Apple stuff, I had a go at syncing the phone. Just by precisely following the on-screen instructions in iTunes, I wound up bricking the phone and had to take it back to the store to get it resurrected. The store's "Genius" wouldn't tell me just what he had to do to get the "reset to factory settings" to succeed, after it failed when iTunes tried to do it. Apparently mere users aren't supposed to know such things, even if they are interested in learning them.
So, while Apple's stuff usually does "just work", when things go wrong I find that the user gets very little useful information about how to resolve the problem.
Apple's patent attack Posted Mar 11, 2010 22:59 UTC (Thu) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]
It would certainly make me happier if I didn't see a sea of iProduct amongst audiences at free software get-togethers booing and hissing Microsoft.
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