02.01.08
Nokia’s Poor History of Being Sued over Patents
In patent news, Nokia’s big blow has made quite a few headlines since we wrote about it. Remember that Nokia is now a patron of the KDE and owner or Qt.
A quick search reveals that Nokia lost a major battle back in November (for the second time to the same company). It was actually Qualcomm, which is often known or seen as a victim [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20], that started this whole cross-fire.
Qualcomm Wednesday won one of its many battles with Nokia over patents and related licensing fees…
A cross-licensing agreement expired in April, and Nokia has halted payments to cover its use of Qualcomm’s technology for high-speed mobile data…
What a wonderful world. Mutual attacks instead of just peace or truce?
Some months ago we asked ourselves whether or not Microsoft was attacking Linux (using mythical patents claim) as means of retialiation for the money it had lost in patent battles against it. Alcatel-Lucent comes to mind [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.