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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (68850)	3/22/2001 8:25:55 AM
From: SBHX	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Zeev, I know you like the idea of companies owning IP and collecting large royalty payments. This is ok if they are all done above board. But all of the PC industry is built, nurtured, growing based on open standards. Part of that open standards has allowed products like memory and storage and buses to be sold to users at the minimal possible price. INTC has recently been trying hard to close some of this with initiatives on new agp, sse, slot1, etc, but there is always resistance by switching to alternatives when the costs get too high. A standards body like JEDEC primary purpose is to ensure wide open standards on memory. It is also ok for rambus to develop their own key technology and attempt to ensure wide adoption for them, but this cannot be done by stealth and disclosing specifics of patents after the fact. If these were widely knwn, how could sdram possibly become a standard, given the perceived final price after rmbs's possible royalties were added in? What is a fair royalty on true valid IP? I don't know what the answer is to that, but I know that it cannot be 50% of the ASIC company's margin when the entire memory controller is not even 1% in gates or area of the asic. It also cannot be double dipping if the same memory part which has been built and royalties paid was resold on the spot/open market. Given rmbs' intransigient stand on this, it is the entire industry's responsibility to develop a totally different standard and work around what what is perceived to be rmbs IP or to try to invalidate them if there is any question on how they were obtained. We haven't even talked about the actual dates or validity of rmbs patents that seem to be describing sdram yet. I think given how they treat the whole industry, as a purely technology company trying to build bridges, they are unlikely to exist in any meaningful manner moving forward. There's hardly a bridge left that is unburnt. So they will always be alone for a long long time. SbH