37 Android Patent Lawsuits 154
An anonymous reader writes "37 lawsuits have been filed against Android in a little more than a year, the latest one of them being Microsoft's lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec. ReadWriteWeb says 'the number of patent lawsuits related to the Android operating system is unprecedented' and shows an infographic that is also available on Twitpic and as a PDF file, on Scribd. The first two suits were filed in March 2010 by Apple and MobileMedia against HTC. The original source of the chart, the FOSS Patents blog, says that Android's market share is only one factor, other reasons being that Google's patent portfolio is 'far too weak for what's undertaken in connection with Android'; that Google doesn't do 'inbound licensing' from trolls; and that Google tends to ignore patent issues because Google itself is rarely sued: in most of these cases, Android device makers are under attack."
Scare tactics (Score:5, Informative)
Florian (Score:5, Informative)
More crap from Florian Mueller [google.com]?
Yes [google.com].
Yet more FUD (Score:5, Informative)
FOSS Patents Blog is a troll against FOSS (Score:0, Informative)
Who pays Florian Mueller to say this? Microsoft? Apple? Unisys? SCO?
He pretends to be an advocate of free software yet he speaks constantly against free software.
His blog is nothing more than spreading FUD against free software.
Unsurprising and not abnormal (Score:4, Informative)
Never has an operating system had so many challenges to its intellectual property in such a short time period as the Google operating system has had in the last year.
That's because an operating system never gained such popularity in such a short time period*. I expect if the number of patent lawsuits were charted against the number of users, we'd see that the ratio for Android would be normal (or less) compared to other operating systems. It's just that typically these things are spread out over several years, which is how long the OS takes to really become popular.
* Yeah, I just made that up off the top of my head.
Re:Scare tactics (Score:4, Informative)