A war of words continues between executives at tech giants Google and Microsoft as accusations regarding patent bullying fly between the companies.
The public dispute ensued on Wednesday(8/3/11), when David Drummond, the chief
legal officer at Google, posted a company blog missive accusing
Microsoft, Apple and Oracle of excluding Google by banding together to buy "bogus" patents in a direct attack to the Android platform.Though other companies are not responding to this,microsoft decided to reply.Franks X. Shaw, Microsoft's head of corporate communications, countered by publishing an e-mail exchange between legal teams at Microsoft and Google from several months ago, just before the sale of certain patents by Novell. In the e-mails, Microsoft invites Google to join in a shared effort to buy the patents, and Google refuses.
In reply of this,drumond updated his previous post with the following entry--
UPDATE August 4, 2011 - 12:25pm PTFrankly speaking,not tying up with microsoft,google has done the correct thing.No body other than microsoft ever benefited by tying up with them.
It's not surprising that Microsoft would want to divert attention by pushing a false "gotcha!" while failing to address the substance of the issues we raised. If you think about it, it's obvious why we turned down Microsoft’s offer. Microsoft's objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn't fall for it.
Ultimately, the U.S. Department of Justice intervened, forcing Microsoft to sell the patents it bought and demanding that the winning group (Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, EMC) give a license to the open-source community, changes the DoJ said were “necessary to protect competition and innovation in the open source software community.” This only reaffirms our point: Our competitors are waging a patent war on Android and working together to keep us from getting patents that would help balance the scales.
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