[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Milos Rancic wrote:
>> BTW, I am really skeptical about the idea that one large Internet
>> company sues Wikimedia or MediaWiki developers for their patents. It
>> would be a really bad PR for them.
>
> The history of lawsuits often shows that protecting vested interests is
> more important than PR, and that PR departments devote themselves more
> to building justifications for lawsuits.  In the last few years the
> recording and movie industries have appeared quite foolish in their
> prosecutions of those who share music and films.  Even when they win in
> court they inspire others to seek ways to work around the obstacles.

I mentioned "Internet company", not "a company". I really don't think
that Google, Facebook or Amazon are so stupid to sue WMF or anything
strongly connected with WMF because their business is strongly
connected to the perception of their behavior (by Internet users). I
don't think that Microsoft would do that and I don't believe that
Apple has suicidal intentions (even they have problems with some parts
of free culture movement).