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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: synchro who wrote (9333)	3/21/1998 10:02:00 AM
From: Clarksterh	Respond to of 152472

synchro - Did anybody catch the news of HP going off on its own Java standard? The reason appears to be Sun Micro's high license fee for Java. ... One lesson seems to be that if you charge your licensing fees too high, people tend to split and form their own sandbox. True, but Java is software, and the US courts do not like to grant broad protection to software. However, they are much more willing to grant broad protection to hardware. (The courts are living in the stone age, and don't seem to understand that 'hardware' and 'software' are becoming much more transposable. Software tends to be treated more like a novel than a machine.) Thus, I'll bet Sun has no enforceable patents, but Qualcomm obviously does. So, Qualcomm can afford to charge higher fees than Sun, but nonetheless I agree that if they charge fees that are too high people will try to work around the patents or litigate instead of paying them. Clark