EricL, thanks for your detailed investigations and reporting, which are much appreciated.
The history of QCOM's participation in GSM development was loud and clear. Similarly for GPRS, EDGE and W-CDMA. Cyberspace has records everywhere. SI has a fairly good record too.
I'd be very surprised if QCOM finally attending, passively it seems and as I recall, GSM/GPRS/EDGE/W-CDMA friendly FRANDly meetings involved QCOM unwittingly agreeing to give away their intellectual property.
While there might be a couple of naive newbie QCOM individuals who did attend such meetings, and unwittingly showed more participation and personal integration than was wise among a pack of hyenas, who might have seemed friendly and intelligent participants in a happy search for extra-TDMA intelligence, it's a long stretch to suppose that means QCOM forfeited their intellectual property rights to some one-for-all, all-for-one communist system of property being subsumed for the common good.
We had Ericsson claiming to have invented CDMA back in the 1890s and that QCOM had nothing to do with W-CDMA, let alone GSM. Now we are asked to believe that not only did QCOM invent a lot of W-CDMA, but that they also invented some vital parts of GSM, GPRS, and EDGE and not only that, they agreed to give away their right to collect any payment for their invention of modern-day GSM, perhaps by inadvertent attendance at multi-mode meetings intended to make W-CDMA a happening technology, which they did achieve [though the GSM Guild almost stymied it with dopey ideas on how it should work].
I know people make mistakes, and big ones at that, but it would be very strange given the circumstances, if some QCOM people blundered into GSM meetings and gave away the keys to the castle to people who had for years given all the warning in the world that they were out to rape, pillage and plunder the CDMA citadel. QCOM staff capable of attending such meetings couldn't possibly be ignorant of the background. The "passive" comment itself is suggestive that they were very wary, rather than diffident, baffled, overwhelmed, ignorant, etc. They were obviously there as observers rather than gung ho participants.
I'm sure there are lawyers climbing all over this. What a LOT of fun it must be to have big companies with loads of cash and vast legal consequences, not to mention geopolitical games among sovereign countries in WTO and other trade relationships, not to mention military positions. The lawyers are in their element. Let's hope the QCOM ones know what they are about. And let's hope the various technical people in QCOM didn't blunder as you are suggesting they might have done by attending 3GPP and other gung ho industry groups.
It must be more fun than searching Granny's carry-on bag for toothpaste and lip balm which could be terrorist explosives, though the authorities are loving the latest terrorist liquidity threat, as they love all of them. They get to strut around in uniforms, carrying guns, and boss people and frighten them with state power, which makes terrorist power look pathetic. Around the world, millions of people are queuing at stupid security checks, flights cancelled. It is simply impossible to hijack another aircraft with box-cutters, or scimitars, let alone nail clippers. It must be tempting to be a terrorist just for the fun of seeing the chaos that trivial acts such as getting claustrophobia can provoke. Aircrew must be really stupid and pathetic if they can't handle an old lady getting panicky without diverting the flight. Then they send fighter jets up to accompany it, and perhaps shoot it down if necessary [or somebody makes a 'frandly-fire' mistake].
I wonder if a Granny could hijack a 747 full of people by calling out "I've got a lip-balm bomb and am taking over the plane. Don't anybody do anything stupid. We are going to Havana."
Mqurice |
