Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies."
This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.
And I'm sure this is a bad thing (Score:1, Funny)
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The issue isn't why it's bad, people will just moan about the motivations. I bet we'll see a lot of:
"well of course Google is doing this, they want maximum exposure of their technologies cause it makes $$$, do no evil yeah right!"
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Is a "pledge" legally binding?
Re:And I'm sure this is a bad thing (Score:5, Interesting)
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To a lawyer nothing is legally binding. It is a challenge, like jailbreaking an iPhone.
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In general, no, with patents specifically, yes.
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Even if it isn't, the bad publicity Google would get the moment they reneged would be very real. And it's probably legally binding in the sense that "they said I could" should be a pretty good defence.
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Not if Google, and/or their patent portfolio, gets bought out, and we know that never happens in the tech sector. Especially in publicly-traded companies.
Tread carefully.
Re:And I'm sure this is a bad thing (Score:5, Interesting)
It's actually very clever. It means less open source software is GPLed, because the GPLv3 means that patent rights have to be dismissed. Thus more will be BSDed/MITed. Then, because it's BSDed/MITed, more big companies will actually use the software (because most big companies avoid GPLv3 like the plague). Then those big companies will release a closed version, and have to pay google.
Cunning indeed.
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That's GPLv3's problem, not Google's. Create a patent-unfriendly license and companies that need to defend their patents won't support it - surprise!
In fact everything you described seems to be an all around equitable solution (if you choose open source you get to use Google's patents without worry, if you close source it (obviously because there is a business reason ie. $$) you have pay for the patent licensing.
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I never claimed it was a problem for google. I claimed it was a boon for them. They get a double benefit:
1) They encourage people to use BSD/MIT licenses, meaning google get to use more code without publishing their own.
2) They get other companies using their patents, and hence get to bill more people, even if those people aren't the open sourcers.
Great strategy.
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Also if you read it it only cover specific Google patents. So they can identify the business areas where this strategy is a net win and put those patents into the pledge. In other areas where it might be a net loss they don't.
In fact I think this whole pledge is about a specific Google project, but they haven't told us what that is.
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Yay false dichotomy! :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
Plenty of projects, even new ones, use GPLv2, and even it didn't exist, could write such a license from scratch. There's no reason to believe that the only licensing options are 'open to everyone for all uses' and 'must throw away your patent rights'.
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"most big companies avoid GPLv3 like the plague"... [citation needed]. This simply isn't true. A few very specific large firms do, Apple being one.
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"most big companies avoid GPLv3 like the plague"... [citation needed]. This simply isn't true. A few very specific large firms do, Apple being one.
Which big companies have adopted GPLv3?
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I guess my question is how much legal weight this "pledge" has. Microsoft's "community promise" not to sue over Mono was (if I recall) legally unconvincing. Is this any different?
Not saying it's bad, mind you. I'm just expressing skepticism until it's been analyzed by some people who understand this crap better than I do.
it is in enforceable in at least US, UK, Australia (Score:5, Insightful)
In some countries, it can only be used as a defense, to have a lawsuit dismissed. You can't sue someone to make them live up to a unilateral promise. They say it's "a shield, not a sword". In AU, it can be used as a sword - you could sue Gopgle to force them to live up to the promise, or for damages if they don't. That means that an Aussie user could sue Google for damages if Google threatened to enforce the patent against some software on which they rely.
Aside from tbe legal terms, imagine you're on the jury. Google sues someone. The defendant points out that Google promised not to, essentially giving the defendant permission to use the patents. As a juror, how would YOU decide the case?
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The defendant points out that Google promised not to, essentially giving the defendant permission to use the patents. As a juror, how would YOU decide the case?
I suppose that depends on how smart I am and how well each side presented their case. :)
Me, personally, knowing what I know about this right now, I'd find against Google.
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Yes, unless GOOGs very high priced, very well connected lawyers manage to convince a judge that the promise shouldn't be admissible in court.
Re:it is in enforceable in at least US, UK, Austra (Score:5, Interesting)
It's really a matter of reputation. Google's business model turned out to be largely relying on their being Open Source friendly. With this pledge they reinforce this image. If they betray this image, the backdraft could be painful. Probably not fatal, but painful.
I'm really as defiant as the next guy about Google's behaviour, and I don't take at face value their motto of not doing evil, but on the matters of IP they seem to have been consistently opposed to maximalism, and have supported many open stuff. I watch them closely on data privacy matters, but in most other issues I find their position decent - so far.
Good point, it's PR enforcable for sure (Score:1)
their motto of not doing evil
-pedant- It's "Don't Be Evil" (aka Microsoft) -/pedant- We ALL do wrong occasionally, just because we're human and we screw up. For some companies, evil is what they ARE, nastiness is their core.
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It did? I thought it turned out to be largely relying on advertising revenue.
What this has to do with either open source or patents is not at all clear.
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Excellent post, raymorris. Though one thing I wanted to bring up is that I believe there might be rare circumstances where you can sue to enforce a unilateral promise. An example might be someone publically pledging to donate a large sum of money to a charity. Say, if a corporation pledged to donate five million dollars to a hospital to build a build a new maternity ward. If that hospital reasonably believed the pledge and started engaging contractors to build it but the corporatin then withdrew the promise
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If google had a digestion system then you better do everything in your power not to be given a tour of it.
After Reader Debacle, Let's retry Don't Be Evil (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably not so well disguised sabre-rattling? (Score:2)
Microsoft is using Map Reduce - wonder if they infringe?
Perhaps Apple is using it as well, somewhere.
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If it's an open source project, then it will be safe for those companies to use it. This shouldn't have anything to do with the end-user. It's about the project. Oracle, Microsoft, and Apple cannot fork map reduce and sell their own version. They can fork it and develop their own free version though.
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I think the 'don't be evil' motto was a faulty one, creating irrealistic expectations. Google was never like Twitter, their morals were always somewhat flexible. The wonderful thing about Google isn't that they do no evil, but that they also do more than enough amazing things to offset it.
Re:After Reader Debacle, Let's retry Don't Be Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
There are other free RSS services out there, or you can make your own server. It's trivial to export your feeds from google.
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Nah, the Reader debacle is just mismanagement. Somebody very high up saw that they couldn't monetize the service, didn't know what else to do but kill it, so they killed it.
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just-another-profit-centered-corporation
every corporation exists to earn profits, and nothing else. if it is not doing that the leadership will be replaced.
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They're not trying to sucker anyone. Google is a large corporation with different divisions. One division decided to kill Reader to push people in to the still-born G+, and another is doing some PR on patents, something Google have been stuck in courts wasting millions on for years.
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That said, Google has done more than just kill Reader -- they've also stopped being such a bold defender of the open internet, and open source software. They are falling in line with general tech-corporate Americana. Just a couple days ago, a story on slashdot opened with the phrase "...a post-don't be
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You use a Socratic relativistic argument, about how evil has no definition and is a relative term, and then use an analogy about "slaughtering kittens" -- to prelude into another logical fallacy that you did employ (despite your checking) -- Reductio ad absurdum, demonstrated in your statement " Since slaughtering kittens i
A Bit Weird? (Score:5, Insightful)
" It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge."
That's not weird. That's exactly how it should be.
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Thanks AC, that's exactly what I came to say. And I bet those who think it is weired are the same who doesn't understand the GPL and thing everything should be MIT/BSD licensed...
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The more interesting bit in my mind is the fact that it does not apply to closed-source software that links against open-source software unless that closed-source software qualifies as "internal use only". As far as I'm concerned, if the licensing terms of the open source software allows you to link against it in a closed-source app, you should be able to do so without worrying about whether there might be any patents embodied in that open-source software.
Absent that assurance, no piece of open source sof
Re:A Bit Weird? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ethically, that makes this pledge worthless for anything other than GPLed software.
So, still pretty darn useful then? Who said Google wanted to make its patents available to proprietary software that links against open-source software? They're trying to help open-source software, not proprietary software built on top of open-source software (see: Apple).
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No, no, you misunderstand. I'm not talking about taking anything closed source. I'm talking about most open source software teams of any significant size having patent license requirements on all contributions, and that this patent license is incompatible with most of those requirements because it is not broad enough to cover every downstream user who is using the open source software as open source, covering those downstream users only if they are using it either exclusively with open source or exclusiv
Ahh softwarey patents (Score:1)
Well, duh. (Score:1)
"if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge."
And if i were to give code under a free fork that was from Microsoft divulged under NDA, it wouldn't be covered either.
If you use something you need a license for in ways not covered by the license and not in ways the license cannot control your use, then you are not allowed to use it that way.
Wny is this only a problem for some idiots when it's a GPL license, and absolutely unnoticed by them under any other license?
Re:Well, duh. (Score:4, Interesting)
because people love to make it sound like GPL is terrible when it's not. Specifically people who are: pro apple, pro microsoft, or anti google. The rest of the world understands GPL and why it's great and takes advantage of it every day.
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because people love to make it sound like GPL is terrible when it's not
it's terrible to businesses that rely on proprietary software for survival. you can comment that those businesses are out of touch and have a poor business model, but that just shows how out of touch you are with businesses.
businesses will avoid entering into any "contract" that removes their options. even if they are OSS-friendly, they want to control what happens next, not be legally bound to act one way or the other.
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But the GPL ravers seem to think it's the only open source license on the planet.
But that's what they want otherwise-uncommitted software developers to think. It's a political statement intended to bamboozle, just like the Reps/Dems pretending that the only other political party is the other one. I think it is a damn shame when being "pro-Freedom" is done by being actually anti-choice; I want both, and I hope others do too (but won't force them).
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not really, it's more the fact that the GPL can prevent you from forking someone's work in a way that makes it proprietary.
Apache and BSD do not share such wordings in their license. It's an issue of control: either you can force the fact that you can't take away other people's control like GPL does, or you can say "I leave it out there for the world to benefit" but turn a blind eye to the fact that people can and do manipulate your work to their own benefit (and detriment of everyone else).
That's not to sa
Google's a "me, too!" (Score:2, Interesting)
Note that IBM did the same thing with about 1000 of its patents, more than 10 years ago. And shortly
thereafter, followed up with another 1000 or so.
Re:Google's a "me, too!" (Score:5, Informative)
Note that IBM did the same thing with about 1000 of its patents, more than 10 years ago. And shortly
thereafter, followed up with another 1000 or so.
As stated in Google's blog link above.
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What's your point? Just because one company was generous a decade ago, no other company is ever allowed to be generous in the same way?
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Yes it is. It is news to anyone who uses MapReduce-style open source software, which includes a lot of people who read slashdot.
BSD (Score:1)
Good for Google (Score:2)
This is something you will never see Microsoft do.
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That is literally something Microsoft did years ago. What?
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A Microsoft promise is worth what? How long have been reading ./ ???
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Public promises are legally binding and when M$ makes them with their boat loads of lawyers they know it, they might stumble until reminded on occasion but they will eventually stick with them, although you really do have to check the fine print with them. After all M$ is the true champions of the guarantee nothing warranty, EULA's.
Restated: tech businesses beware (Score:2)
Love the understated way Google's rattling the patent saber here: "If you stay open-source you're probably safe, but if we think you're a commercial entity with closed source we may unleash the software patent lawyers."
Irrelevant to the real issues of patents (Score:1)
If Google owns any patents that are obvious, (and if they don't, other companies certainly do) then giving a free pass to open source doesn't do much to ameliorate the problem. Many people like to earn money. Even people who contribute to open source are often partly motivated by getting paid jobs as a result of their efforts. Given this, it is still a problem that smaller co
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It is relevant because Google is doing this for a reason, and there are really only two possible ones. First, it is a free gift to the Open Source community. That would be very nice but that's not how this decision would be interpreted by most people. Second, it is Google's attempt to ameliorate the impact of some of the unfair aspects of patents system, on open source developers. In that case, my claim that this measure is irrelevant to the real issues, because it doesn't address the root cause, is cor
A Pledge is Good (Score:2, Insightful)
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Pledge to keep all their services running forever?
Are you insane? Does any company make that pledge? Google or anybody else has every right to cancel a service or experiment they deem unnecessary. Anybody who expects anything else from a business is a fool.
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Overlords (Score:1)
I, for one, welcome our new google overlords if this in fact means other following the same example would be spared from patent claims (applies to the US mostly but still).
not meaningless (Score:2)
to all those saying this is meaningless, don't trust them, they could revoke this so don't rely on it. why not just request a license for $0 under these exact terms if you wish to use any of these patents in your project? then there will be no question of this being legally binding and u can use the contents of these patents freely.
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.. except, how will it play out if they decide to infringe on your patents? You can't attack them then; suddenly you fall afoul of their "free" patents and now you're screwed.
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well considering your project is free/open you have one of two options.
1. not care - think of it as some sort of cross-licence deal.
2. get upset that someone is using what is your intellectual property, despite the fact that you are also using theirs. stop using theirs and then sue them.
Darwin and Motorola (Score:2)
Question: was Google ever going to sue F/OSS developers?
I don't know. Is Apple still developing certain low-level parts of Mac OS X under the APSL, or has Darwin [wikipedia.org] gone completely proprietary? What I do know is that Motorola Mobility, a Google company, has sued Apple [wikipedia.org].
Re:Darwin and Motorola (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple sells proprietary crud layered on top of free software. They generally don't want you to be even aware of the free software. They just want you to fixate on the shiny shiny proprietary bits on the surface. The fact that they exploit the free labor of hobbyists doesn't alter the basic crass nature of their activities.
Apple are not "F/OSS developers".
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WebKit is open source and developed by Apple.
Re:Darwin and Motorola (Score:5, Informative)
KHTML is what WebKit is based on.
It was not developed by Apple.
They did make major improvements, but they did base their work on KHTML which is LGPL.
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So you're only doing FOSS if you're the originator of a project?
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WebKit is open source and developed by Apple.
Not just Apple.
From Wikipedia
No one company has ultimate control over Webkit. If any one company decides to, you'd see a fork and abandonme
Re:Darwin and Motorola (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, they DEFINITELY don't want you to be aware of free software, which is why the horribly obfuscated URL apple.com/opensource lists several hundred projects they are using, as well as links (and fully browsable source!) to anything they have modified. In fact, it's probably the simplest, most well-organized, and most public list of open source projects of any large company I have seen.
http://www.apple.com/opensource/ [apple.com]
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And that's just promoted all over the place in the actual UI that everyone actually uses (which was, you know, his actual point) as opposed to just being some obscure website link that isn't easily found unless you search for it...
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Utter crap and you know it. Lists of open source that exceed apples by very far can be found at your local apt, yast, ports or other open-source "retailer".
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The free labor or hobbyists meme might have been true a decade and a half ago and maybe not even then. A good portion of open source software is written by people gainfully employed by otherwise closed sourced organizations. They're paid to accomplish X and use an open source solution and contribute code back to the project. Other times they are students or faculty of universities. Increasingly they're paid by an ISV that is selling support/features built on some OSS
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Using this logic, Google, IBM and all the other companies like Redhat leech off of hobby devs and don't pay devs themselves, like Apple pays devs to work on webkit, among other things.
Your post is modded insightful, but it's really a troll and devoid of actual fact.
--
BMO
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I imagine as you say this, that there is froth and spittle being flecked all over the screen and keyboard you use.
I'm typing at this moment on a shiny proprietary OS based on open source core and bowser that have received huge improvements. I watch stupid anime shows at night, and likely, I've been sucked into this shiny hedonistic fly trap you so abhor.
Yet part of me notes that you forgot to mention how Android came to be slapped on top of someone else's JAVA, and I expect that Samsung will fork it, and th
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From the summary:
The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party.
Re:Ah but can you not also make bridges out of sto (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that the same as saying that if you bought a patent you could void all current licensed copies in existence? Each of those licenses was a contract of sorts, right?
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Isn't that the same as saying that if you bought a patent you could void all current licensed copies in existence? Each of those licenses was a contract of sorts, right?
If you buy a patent, you can grant new licenses, but you can't do anything about prior grants. Google has just attempted to grant a license to everyone who uses a compatible source license. To me the question is, can you even do that without a legal document, e.g. the GPL?
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That's a good point! I'd say no. But honestly i have no idea what a patent license looks like. We've all seen copyrights though. Could you bake a patent license into a copyright notice that allows it to create new license copies? That sounds really odd.
Re: Thus Google reveals their bias. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or to translate from flamebait to English:
They'll share with anyone else who shares. Same concept as the GPL, though admittedly in a somewhat more vague and less legally-binding manner.
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Or to translate from English to Marketing:
Google will contribute its patented technology immediately to benefit the public good, and pledges to support open-source community projects into the future. Google will confine all its competitive legal actions to the commercial arena, encouraging the growth of non-Google technologies, pushing the state of the art ever forward.
...I feel dirty now... I think I got some marketing slime on me... ...Turing help me, I want multi-level enterprise synergy to embiggen the
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Or to translate from flamebait to English:
They'll share with anyone else who shares. Same concept as the GPL, though admittedly in a somewhat more vague and less legally-binding manner.
Correction:
They'll share with anyone else who shares, but as long as they're the only ones profiting from it.
It's better than some companies, but hardly the slam dunk or sea change it's made out to be.
Honestly, their lawyers probably already told them that it wasn't worth going after any open source projects because in a lot of cases there wasn't money in it.
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It's very much possible to profit from open source software.
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The code that results from this must be open. It looks like you can profit from it the same way you can profit from other open source software -- either using it (if Brother made their printer drivers open source; or an engineering firm released open source CAD software), or selling support for it. Same conditions as the GPL.
And yea, they're almost certainly doing it because it's not worth fighting, and they're making that position public. That's nice. It probably cost them something to make this statement,
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Is it 100% altrustic?
if we get any action that is >0% altruistic from a corporation or isn't directly harming us, we are doing good.
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Specifically, Google is saying they will share their patents with anyone else who shares their source code.
It's an unfair deal (unlike the GPL, where the contract is "I share code, you share code"). Until they actually open source their MapReduce (and other) code, this is pure PR spin.
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This isn't about "leaning on closed source". This is about supporting the end users that Google just abandoned.
If they don't want it anymore, then they should have no problem giving it away and letting the user community fend for itself.
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Not saying this is evil or greedy, but it is more one-sided in Google's favor than I was expecting.
Really? You don't expect Google to defend themselves if they get attacked? People that don't fight back when attacked are an extraordinarily rare exception. I don't know why anyone would think Google would be any different.
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Don't fuck with me and I won't fuck with you.
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It was probably the way you brought the Bill of Rights into the discussion. Likely they wanted to argue with you but couldn't because it would undo all their moderation on the page.