Daniel Eran DilgerGoogle's $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola was ostensibly about protecting the Android platform, and by extension its licensees, from patent infringement claims by Apple and Microsoft. Motorola's tens of thousands of patents and patent filings were supposed to allow Android a countersuit defense of its infringement cases.
That isn't happening however, notes FOSS Patents writer Florian Mueller. Samsung's new licensing deal with Microsoft is just the latest in a series of deals that have also involved HTC, Acer, ViewSonic, General Dynamics, Itronix, Velocity Micro, Onkyo, and Wistron.
"If Samsung truly believed that Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility was going to be helpful to the Android ecosystem at large," Mueller wrote, "it would have waited until that deal is closed before concluding the license agreement with Microsoft. But Samsung probably knows it can't rely on Google. It decided to address Android's intellectual property issues on its own."
Seeing what sticks
In addition to announcing a partnership with Microsoft that pays the software vendor royalties on the Android products Samsung sells, the deal also affirms Samsung's support for Microsoft's competing Windows Phone 7 platform.
Samsung is also reported to be stepping up efforts on its own internal Bada smartphone platform, which it launched last year in parallel with very similar phone handsets running WP7 or Android.
Additionally, the company has also announced plans with Intel to support a new Linux-based platform named Tizen, which essentially a replacement of the MeeGo program Intel initiated with Nokia, merging two efforts to produce an open source mobile platform the two firms had earlier maintained in parallel: Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo.
Nokia has since effectively abandoned MeeGo to pursue its WP7 partnership with Microsoft, while Google recently announced its own plans with Intel to bring Android to the chip-maker's Atom mobile processors.
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24 Comments
So this licensing deal with MS will provide some protection for Samsung in their ongoing legal battle with Apple...And if so, how?
I am still convinced that Google bought MMI because they were threatening to sue other Android OEMs for patent violations. That is the only theory that explains the buying price.
Even if Android should survive (unlikely) the combined attacks of Oracle and Apple (without making Android too expensive, or killing it altogether), keeping a platform alive when the own users sue each other by proxy for patents really violated by Google, would have been the death toll.
Between Amazon killing Android tablets today (and cementing an unrealistic price point) and all these patent battles, we should see a lot of OEMs seeking alternatives in the near future. Android may have peaked without generating a penny for Google.
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So this licensing deal with MS will provide some protection for Samsung in their ongoing legal battle with Apple...And if so, how?
It wont.
It will provide protection from MS's patents.
Digler's articles here collectively make a very convincing case:
If you want timely news you should just and just read fosspatents.com and digitimes.com directly and just skip AppleInsider's slim rehashes of those sites.
Don't know about that. I would never have the time to go through all these sites. He links to the original article and adds some own commentary/details. And it is quite clear, what was taken from the original source and what has been added. Can't see what is wrong with that. Trying to capture the essential information from something is not necessarily a "slim rehash" (getting large amounts of people to agree about the "essential" parts is a different story).
DED has almost always been right with his predictions, even with pretty bold ones almost nobody else was courageous enough to publish. I prefer that over re-worded press releases any given day.