Groklaw has a good piece on Google’s multi-sided patent war for Android, against Microsoft, Apple and Oracle.

In today’s shades-of-grey world it’s usually quite silly to say “these are the good guys” and “these are the bad guys”. So rarely do companies ever act in anybody’s interest other than their own, there are hardly ever any good guys at all. I’m biased, but I think it’s pretty obvious, at least in this case, who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

The situation has risen to ridiculous proportions. Google, a giant multinational corporation, is releasing software (that is “almost” open source) and making it available for smart phone vendors across the world to modify for their own purposes, free of charge (if they don’t want the Google-branded stuff). And a group of other multinational corporations, including Microsoft, Apple and Oracle, are clearly teaming up together to sue every company related to the project — of course in today’s environment any software company can sue any other software company if they don’t like what they’re doing.

And the saddest part of all is that uninformed people, and worst of all journalists, have it backwards. Believing the lies of Microsoft and friends, people actually believe that Google is somehow stealing other companies’ intellectual property rights, and should be made to pay. This is despite the fact that the majority of Google’s legal costs have so far gone towards demonstrating that they haven’t infringed anything at all. Google needs to win this war — it’s a war over whether the future of computing will be open or closed.

Courtesy Abdulla