Today, I read an article from Foss Patents Blog called
“Google’s promise not to assert patents against open source software: just a PR
stunt.” It discussed how today, Google announced that it is pledging 10 patents
to open source software. What pledging entails is promising not to assert your
patents against open source software. In comparison, IBM and Sun Microsystems
in 2005 pledged 500 and 1,600 patents respectively to open source software.
The author of the blog criticized Google for giving pledging
so few of its patents when it has an unimaginably large intellectual property
and patent portfolio. The author also commented that Google is not being
transparent at all in hiding their patent portfolio size and talked about how
the patents database of Google’s website doesn’t show the correct number of
patents owned by Google, because many of their purchased patents haven’t been officially
reissued in Google’s name, and only Google knows their true patent portfolio
size. Whereas Microsoft reveals all of its patents to the public, Google keeps
this information secret—perhaps they consider it a trade secret?
If this pledging of patents to open source software was
supposed to be a PR stunt for Google, why didn’t they pledge more and appear
more generous?
I’ll expand on this in my Youtube blog. Article is right
here: http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/googles-promise-not-to-assert-10.html
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