Apple sued over Mac OS X 'quick boot'

nt

The patent system is so broken that it matters more what motivation someone has to sue a particular company than trying to perform any meaningful analysis as to whether one OS or another violates a patent. Someone who develops software in today's market knows that there obscure and submarine patents out there that someone can use (or abuse) as the basis of a demand or suit. The meaningful analysis is whether a particular company is a target for someone to slow their adoption in the market (jealous competitor), or a troll/leech wanting a payday for little to no work.

You make a valid point. I guess what I was wondering more is how this particular patent reads and whether or not it happens to affect the various methods Linux distros have used to improve boot performance (which imho is really awesome). Being a developer myself, I'm always afraid of actually reading patents because that makes me and my company susceptible to triple damages should we ever be found to infringe a particular patent, so by advice of my company's lawyers we are told never to read any patents at all remotely related to what we do.

They'd sue you regardless, if they A) perceive you as a threat, B) thought you had deep pockets, or C) all of the above.

Sure, but if I read over any of their patents prior to the lawsuit (and possibly during), we'd be liable for triple damages. At least if I and the other engineers don't read them, we can't be held accountable for more than 1x damages :)

Guys --

All the leeching parasites/broken patent system comments are dead-on on this one.

My less uninformed than you might guess opinion is that this patent would founder on the rocks of the obviousness standard as re-invigorated by the Supreme Court if anybody were to mount a serious challenge.

I'm starting to think all this patent cr@p is just an attempt by the big players to force a new form of collectivism (a kind of neo communism, that just leaves gov't out of the equation). I think the motivation is to sandbag against future market changes, like the netbook craze. It's still cr@ppy that they're barring new players from the market, though.