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* Posts by 0rkki

3 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Mar 2011

Behind Microsoft's $15 Samsung Android royalty claim

0rkki
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Re: Nothing wrong with patent system

Pretending what you say is has any sense (it seems you just want to provoke people), I think we need to have more than $20 discount to cover the extortion fee.

When the device crosses the country borders, there will we some toll fee added (not sure what it is exactly called - I am not native English speaker). The shops and everybody before them need to add certain percentage to the price to cover their costs and add profit. Then we have in most places something like VAT. All this will be added to the top of the added price that manufacturer need to ask for their device. These additions are relative to the price that the original manufacturer gets.

Even if the manufacturer throws some of the profit away, and not add the full $15 to the price they get per device, it seems the price that customers need to pay to get the product is significantly more than the $15 extorted by the patent troll.

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0rkki
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Linux

Re: Why not change SDCard's filesystem from vFat to ext3/4 ?

Adding to Babai's suggestion...

Thinking about the Windows users who dislike installing alternative file system support to every Windows PC that they use to access the Android system, I am wondering if Google and the manufacturers could device a way for those customers to pay the 15USD license fee directly to Microsoft and enable FAT support in the Android device. The technicalities should be solved in technical, legal and business level. I like to fantasize that the end users could directly make the choice by themselves, in the process be reminded whom they are siding with their technology choices, instead of less sophisticated users left thinking "Android is so difficult".

Additional benefit is that the 15USD will not be shown as more than 15USD, because of added taxes and other fees that are added on top of the license fee.

(On the other end, Apple [I have heard] requires people to access their phones using iTunes software, so we have a precedence that we do not necessarily need FAT support to have the users accept the device).

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Google copyright purge leaves Android developers exposed

0rkki
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Quoting Linus Torvalds on the matter

You can check groklaw on the subject

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110322014831856

which points to this one:

http://www.itworld.com/open-source/140916/android-sued-microsoft-not-linux

"It seems totally bogus. We've always made it very clear that the kernel system call interfaces do not in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL, and the kernel details are exported through the kernel headers to all the normal glibc interfaces too.

"The kernel headers contain various definitions for the interfaces to user space, and we even actively try to make sure that the headers can be used by user space (and try to mark which of the headers are expected to be usable in such a way). Exactly because we know user space needs those details in order to interact with the kernel.

"So I haven't looked at exactly what Google does with the kernel headers, but I can't see that they'd want to do anything fundamentally different from glibc in this respect," Torvalds wrote.

Torvalds seems to be at best bemused about the issue and perhaps a tad irritated.

"Of course, we do have our own 'internal' headers too, and we have stuff that is meant to be relevant only for the kernel. But there would be no point for Google to even use those, since they are useless outside of the kernel, so I don't see what the whole brouhaha would be all about. Except if it's somebody politically motivated (or motivated by some need of attention)," he continued.

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