Saturday, May 17, 2014

Apple stepping back from the "thermonuclear war" with Google

In a surprise turn of events on Friday Apple and Motorola (still technically owned by Google) have agreed to dismiss their lawsuits against each other in Washington State. The two filed a joint application for dismissal with the court and this comes as Apple and Google have apparently decided to bury the hatchet in their ongoing patent disputes with each other. The two released a statement on Friday stating that they will drop their ongoing patent disputes with each other and their subsidiaries, and that they will now work together in attempting to reform the state of the patent system. This sounds like it is a great move for both companies and hopefully means that we will see them working on the problems together rather than going to court over disagreements. It also means that maybe we might not see the Steve Jobs "thermonuclear war" quote as much anymore. We will still have to see what happens with Apple and the other Android manufacturers that are still battling in court, my guess is this type of agreement won't be made with Samsung any time soon.

You can read the court document over at the Apple Insider.

(I also thought it was interesting that NeXT Software was a party to this case, I had not realized that Apple had continued to operate this as its own entity, I figured they had just subsumed it into the corporation itself back in the 90's)

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