Sendo Accuses MS of Stealing Smartphone IP

Nate B. writes "According this article in The Inquirer, it seems that Sendo, a UK based development house, has filed suit in Texas as of December 23 to recoup monetary damages for IP it claims Microsoft stole. From the article, 'The company's grievance is that after years of working closely with Microsoft on the development of Windows Smartphone 2002, the fruits of their endeavours were handed straight over to HTC, which manufactures the SPV handset for Orange.' The story also includes this cute footnote, 'When Sendo announced it was to receive funding from Microsoft, I and some other British journalists asked Sendo's Hugh Brogan at the press briefing, in the London Waldorf, whether he wasn't afraid that the company might just take its information and then dump his firm. He claimed then there was no possibility of that.'" Seems there was more to this story than originally thought.

Officials commented...

[hermescom]

"We did get a little suspicious when MS representatives asked us to just hand over all of our research papers, but then Bill assured us that it was all going to be taken care of, and showed us the contract on his laptop asking us to click I Agree. The thing was so long and boring, and crammed into such a small window, that our lawyers just clicked "I agree" without really reading through the whole thing." Sendo Officials admitted early Thursday.

"We're still looking over the contract to see the ramifications of the "we owe you nothing" clause."

Microsoft officials declined to comment at press time.

Profiting with Microsoft

[Randolpho]

1) Make deal with Microsoft. 2) Get screwed by Microsoft. 3) ??? 4) Profit!

M$ screws someone

[Tom]

film at 11

Why don't we just have a weekly "screwed by M$ this week" special, like the slashback? Would help condense a lot of stories, ranting and general anti-M$ flaming into a few places.

My IP Problems...

[LordYUK]

the other night I had a problem with my routers IP... I called tech support and they had me /release and /renew it. maybe that would help. ((covers ears so as to not hear 1,000,000 geeks groan at once for such bad geek humor))

Your post rewritten:

[Randolpho]

1) Bash Microsoft
2) ???
3) Karma!

Should have used DRM...

[ewg]

Sendo should have protected their intellectual property using Digital Rights Management technology. If only they had set the "Do not share with low-cost manufacturers" flag.

Re:Trusting MicroSoft

[ajp]

Yes, they did a lot more than "communicate" with Sendo. I'm not terribly familiar with the details of this issue as opposed to the issue I commented on: Mono. You'll note that I haven't posted with regard to Sendo. I have little use for internet cell phones and such nonsense.

The rest of this post is cut&paste from the Mono FAQ. Maybe if you inform yourself of a few facts before posting you won't seem like such a zealous idiot. I'm not posting to convince people like you that Microsoft is a fantastic social force. I'm posting to provide a little bit of reality to these discussions. It just so happens that the MS topics are so often the ones in the worst need of a reality check.

Question 35: Is Microsoft helping Ximian with this project?

There is no high level communication between Ximian and Microsoft at this point, but engineers who work on .NET or the ECMA groups have been very friendly, and very nice to answer our questions, or clarify part of the specification for us.

Microsoft is interested in other implementations of .NET and are willing to help make the ECMA spec more accurate for this purpose.

Ximian was also invited to participate in the ECMA committee meetings for C# and the CLI.

Question 36: Is Microsoft or Corel paying Ximian to do this?

No.

Question 37: Do you fear that Microsoft will change the spec and render Mono useless?

No. Microsoft proved with the CLI and the C# language that it was possible to create a powerful foundation for many languages to inter-operate. We will always have that.

Even if changes happened in the platform which were undocumented, the existing platform would a value on its own.

Intellectual property

[Richthofen80]

Well, since most slashdotters don't believe in intellectual property, they should obviously side with microsoft.

Re:and in other news

[Grishnakh]

Yeah, it really bugs me how people are jealous of Microsoft's success and try to take them down with lawsuits. It's just like how the government was jealous of John Gotti's success so they put him in jail because of some silly "laws" that he broke.

Re:Yawn

[SN74S181]

This is not any Fortune 500 company, but a high-visibility one.

This is not only a high-visibility Fortune 500 company, but one with a bad enough history.

This is also a mean, high-profile big company that happens to be in direct, ruthless, dishonest competition with the main public of Slashdot, that is, free software hackers, users and friends

You're talking about Oracle?