That’s what Oracle has done in its suit against Google. Google asked for re-examination of the patents and the patents are falling like flies. Two more patents have been rejected on the grounds that they were obvious. So far 92% of the claims in the patents that have been examined have been rejected. Combined with a significant toning down of the potential damages, from $billions to $millions Oracle is practically impotent in this matter.

The court in the Netherlands has thrown out Apple’s charges of infringement of a design patent againts Samsung only asking Samsung to change a swipe-scroll feature to clear them for importation. Apple lost huge points for fudging pictures and claiming the shape of a tablet was their idea.

I would say Android/Linux and gadgets running it were on very firm ground today.

UPDATE

I don’t know whether these things are connected but Steve has resigned and Apple has claimed Android/Linux smart phones violate yet another patent… Clearly Apple has no shame or does not value its reputation as an innovator. They seem to trumpet that they are jailers, abusing the real innovators with legal shenanigans. Perhaps they are deluded that they are the only innovators on the planet…

Until now, the USA has been the power in IT. They bought the most of everything so they could tell the OEMs what to make. July, 2011 changed that. China bought more PCs than USA.

It’s possible this is just a temporary “blip” because the US economy is slumping but the whole world of PCs is changing. This may well be a tipping point where the country that produces most of the PCs and that consumes most of the PCs and that does prefer GNU/Linux calls the tune. According to Canonical they have 100% annual growth rate in China and Lenovo alone was shipping a million units.

M$ has leveraged its desktop monopoly into server rooms but the good times may be short-lived.

According to IDC,
“

• Linux server demand increased for the seventh consecutive quarter in 2Q11, with revenue growing 47.5% to $2.7 billion when compared with the second quarter of 2010. Linux servers represent 20.5% of all server revenue in the quarter as Linux server demand was helped significantly by Fujitsu’s large scale K-computer HPC system in Japan.
• Microsoft Windows server demand also continued to show strong growth as Windows-based hardware revenue increased 12.4% year-over-year. Quarterly revenue of $5.9 billion for Windows servers represented 45.5% of overall quarterly factory revenue and 71.0% of all quarterly server shipments.

“

Growth of revenue for GNU/Linux servers is growing four times as fast as revenue for that other OS. If those rates of growth continue:

by the end of 2014, GNU/Linux will take over not only web serving and HPC but also OEM servers… M$ must be hearing footsteps. What’s a poor monopolist to do? What? They’re moving to the cloud? GNU/Linux owns that. Even the big guys use GNU/Linux. IBM claims 80% of Fortune 500s use IBM’s Smart Cloud.